NRA makes immigration reform top workforce priority for 2026

Restaurants are unusually exposed to immigration policy because they cannot simply cut labor the way many other businesses can. National Restaurant Association chief advocacy officer Sean Kennedy said labor costs can rival food costs, but restaurants still need a baseline crew to cook, serve, clean and keep service moving.

That makes the industry highly sensitive to any change that affects the supply of workers. In a June 8 Q&A, Kennedy framed immigration reform as the NRA’s top workforce priority for 2026, alongside concerns about visa delays, enforcement and broader labor regulation.

For line cooks, servers, bartenders, hosts and managers, the risk is not abstract. If enforcement tightens or legal channels stay clogged, operators have fewer ways to cover openings on the line, in the dish pit, behind the bar and in leadership roles, where gaps can quickly throw off a whole shift.

Kennedy said the restaurant business relies heavily on foreign-born workers and that the current system is not workable. He also said wage pressure has stayed elevated since the pandemic, which leaves restaurants with little room to solve staffing shortages by waiting for labor costs to fall.

That is where the pressure lands on the floor. Thin staffing usually means more cross-training, more split attention and more calls for dependable employees to pick up extra hours, especially when a weekend rush or a call-out hits. It also tends to make scheduling less predictable, because managers have fewer people they can rotate through high-volume shifts without burning someone out.

The downstream effects can show up in turnover, too. When workers are scarce, restaurants compete harder on pay, schedules and benefits, and that competition does not stay neatly in HR memos. It affects whether a cook stays for another season, whether a server can string together enough shifts to make rent and whether a manager can keep a kitchen covered without stretching the same people too thin.

Kennedy’s comments made clear that the NRA sees immigration reform as a long-term staffing lever, not a side issue. If lawmakers change the rules, the effects would ripple into hiring, menu execution and how quickly restaurants can expand or even maintain current service levels. For an industry already balancing labor costs against food costs, the workforce strain is likely to hit first where restaurants can least afford it: the everyday grind of keeping service moving.