Marcos was lured by the American dream. When he left Chiapas, Mexico he promised his five siblings and his mom, who were living in a single room shack without electricity, that he’d send money from the other side of the U.S. border.
He said he thought, "I’m going to be rich, I’m going to be sweeping money out of the floor.”
After three treacherous attempts to cross the border he successfully arrived in Southern California. He was 19 and naive.
“It’s so funny because I didn’t know that in order to get a job in America you need to have social security. I don’t even know what that means,” he said.
He was destitute for about four months while he searched for work. Then he made the necessary connections to get a job in Sacramento as a welder.
"I did what everybody does. I went online. I did make a fake number in order to get a job," he said. "It’s pretty easy. And everybody in America who has access to computer can do that."
If you Google "make a fake Social Security card" you will get more than 7 million hits.
Marcos eyed a Sacramento restaurant for about a year, and then he applied for a job.
“I start from the bottom. I was doing prep, dishes, then I moved up to the line," he said.
It took him nearly 20 years to rise to the top. Now, he runs the kitchen as the executive chef.
He wears colorful pants underneath a white apron and flashes a magnetic smile as he directs his staff.
He believes up to 95 percent of the kitchen staff could be in the country illegally. He said that's common in the restaurant industry because people without papers are attractive hires — they're willing to grunt it out.
“They will give me less headache than the people who has papers,” Marcos said.
Conni is one of the owners of the restaurant. She originally hired Marcos as a dishwasher nearly two decades ago. She said she had no idea that he was in the country illegally because it’s nearly impossible to tell.
“They present me their papers. A photocopy of a Social Security card and a photocopy of — I think they refer to it as the green card or the resident alien card — I look at them and they look good to my eyes so you’re hired," she said.
She said she receives a letter from the Internal Revenue Service every year questioning the accuracy of the Social Security numbers she’s filed.
"I know that I’m under no obligation to pursue it any further. We have an attorney and he said you’re not," Conni said.
Brian Halpin, a doctoral candidate at UC Davis, researches low-income workers — especially those in food service.
"In one of the kitchens where I conducted research, at the end of the year when all the W-2s get sent back there would be a stack of 30 W-2s just sitting there and they’d sit there for six months until the employer would just decide to file them away," Halpin said.
He said restaurant owners turn a blind eye because people without papers are not likely to complain because they’re scared they’ll get deported.
"And, so that threat is implicit and shapes your kind of mental framework for everything you do, whether it’s driving your car or working or whatever it is," Halpin said. "And so, the more you can kind of fly under the radar I think the better off people think they’ll be."
Marcos flew under the radar for many years before he was able to gain citizenship through marriage to an American woman. Over time he helped four of his five siblings get established in the U.S. after they crossed the border illegally. In fact, he said at various times all of his four brothers worked in the kitchen of the restaurant using false papers.
"Unfortunately, we don’t like doing this kind of things, but if we don’t have choice, I guess that’s what we have to do," he said.
