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Local taco chain closed today in support of immigrants

Anna's Taqueria locations are closed today to support the Day Without Immigrants protest.

Eater Boston lists other local restaurants that are either shut or showing their support in other ways.

Los Amigos Taqueria, another local chain, explains why it's staying open, but cautions that customers might experience delays because it is giving the day off to any employees who want to participate in the strike:

Being a small local company we cannot afford to close for the day but will be supporting our team members all the way. We were founded by an immigrant family and are made up of a lot of loyal immigrant employees who help make Los Amigos a great place to grab a meal everyday!

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Comments

Whether it's an issue I support or don't support....I don't like when businesses get super political.

I don't want to think about politics or Trump or democrats or republicans. I just want to eat a burrito in peace.

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I don't want to think

Nobody's going to force you.

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For instance, say the ICE starts staging raids on a worker's business because Donald Trump made a political promise to crack down on immigration, and the worker at best misses some hours and at worst gets deported.

So annoying when politics interferes with business!

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the great Anna's/Boca debate. Anna's 4 Lyfe, yo. (Even though I hate their quesadillas. Yes, I will give up cheese-fried-in-a-tortilla in solidarity, such is the courage of my convictions)

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Remember Obama in 2005: “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.”

Or how about in 2015: “What we should be doing is setting up a smart, legal immigration system that doesn’t separate families, but does focus on making sure that people who are dangerous, people who are gang-bangers or criminals — that we’re deporting them as quickly as possible, that we’re focusing our resources there — that we’re focusing on a strong border. We’ve made improvements on all those fronts, but we could be doing even more if we had immigration reform.”

Oh, and then there was this: "Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano promised in 2011 that the rapid pace of deportations would continue. "The numbers are going to be very robust in terms of numbers of removal — we don't fool around about this," Napolitano said that summer. "Our border enforcement is second to none."

Obama liked to say that in his first five years, he'd deported more illegals than President Bush had over his entire eight."

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Since Anna's statement is merely a show of support for immigrants in general, do you assume ALL immigrants are illegal, or just the ones who work at taco joints?

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Well the "day without immigrants" does specify "foreign-born people nationwide, regardless of legal status" so there's that. I just find is "curious" these types of protests or outrage were absent during Obama's two terms because the clear implication here is that all immigrants should be opposed to Donald Trump’s policies regarding illegal immigration.

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because obama didnt want to build a wall around mexico and ban various types of brown people as a whole

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You're totally right. President Obama's immigration policies were never protested...by anyone. Ever.

This never happened.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/immigrant-righ...

Neither did all of these protests, upset that his weren't STRICT enough.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/07/19/hundred...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-04...
http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/15/us/arizona-immigrant...
http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/02/us/california-immigr... http://mashable.com/2014/07/18/anti-illegal-immigr...

Sounds like you think immigration policy was all kitties in baskets and rainbows the entire time Obama was in office.

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if you're a legal resident, have a green card, work visa, you have zero to fear. If you in fact are illegally in the country, illegally working, you do have something to fear. .. and you should.

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You seem to have missed all the news about what happened to green-card holders caught by Dear Leader's initial travel ban.

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Of course you might actually be a caring human and be a green card-carrying, work visa-holding immigrant who has family or friends who don't have papers. You might have this thing thing called basic human empathy. In which case you fear for your friends and family or simply fear for the loss of the traits that make humans human.

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100 percent truthyish and fact free, with your RDA of panic and paranoid delusions!

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Obama took a lot of heat from progressives for not doing more to help the immigrant community and from conservatives who wanted a Trump style round-em-up approach.

In the end Obama took a somewhat centrist position, as he often did. He made it easier for those who came here as kids and families to stay while increasing deportations of select groups who flaunted the rules.

If Congress took Bush (or Obama) up on their desire for comprehensive immigration reform the many times it was proposed perhaps the country would be in a better spot today. It's been congress which is scared shitless to do anything meaningful.

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"Round em up approach?" Kinda like when in less than two weeks after President Obama was inaugurated in 2009, ICE arrested 140 illegals in raids in Georgia, the Carolinas and Colorado. These weren't criminals, either. They had simply failed to show up at immigration hearings.

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Obama was hardly "soft" on undocumented residents. He's was baselessly painted the way by the GOP.

Compared to what we're seeing from Trump, Obama was Mr. Nice Guy.

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None of that compares to the terrible stuff Trump has already done to people with visas and Green Cards.

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they arent white and dont have white sounding names so they basically arent people and DEFINITELY arent american.

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They business owners of all still going to pay their employees while they're closed, right? I hope so.

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...you would know that that does seem to be what they're doing. Now please, stop clutching your pearls so hard, you'll hurt your tiny hands.

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Without immigrants we would have no food in our stores and restaurants. The average obese Trump voter in West Virginia or wherever is sure as hell not going to get off their couch and pick hundreds of pounds of produce per day for a few bucks per hour. We have already seen farms shut down because they can't get enough hard working immigrants. If Trump gets his way this will get worse over the next four years, resulting in businesses shutting down and the cost of food going up.

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Using is moniker is reason 1,000,000 why Trump won.

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For a group whose rallying cry is, "we hate political correctness," they sure seem to demand a lot of safe spaces where no one is allowed to hurt their delicate feelings.

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"For a group whose rallying cry is, 'we hate political correctness', they sure seem to demand a lot of safe spaces where no one is allowed to hurt their delicate feelings."

No, maybe they just don't like hypocrisy. Generalizing "the average obese Trump voter from West Virginia", is not that different from generalizing "the average brown immigrant".

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No, maybe they just don't like hypocrisy.

But they ARE hypocrites. Your so-called "average Trump voter", the non-billionaires, voted out of a belief that they are particularly singled out and persecuted, the most oppressed people in America, and that they're deserving of benefits ("Get rid of that damn Obamacare but don't you touch my Medicare") that they would withhold from others. That's hypocrisy.

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So you think it's ok for people to be paid a few bucks an hour for manual or unskilled labor in this country? Interesting. Now you sound like a true conservative.

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False. The free market will adapt. The price paid to farm hands will increase. Large, industrial farms (please there are no family farms left) will absorb some of the cost and price of produce will also go up slightly. We won't just have less food. That's not how a free market works.

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In the not too distant future robots will be doing all this work. And driving cars/trucks/trains. And taking your order at fast food restaurants and so on, and so on, and so on...

Not tomorrow, but within one or two generations. In some cases lots sooner.

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False. The free market will adapt.

It will, will it? How? By putting the growing season on suspension until all this can be worked out? By magically transferring this "higher price of produce" for a harvest that is not yet planted to farmers right now so that they can start paying these mythical higher wages to "farm hands"? What a load of crap.

(please there are no family farms left)

This isn't Nebraska, son. It's Massachusetts and there are plenty of family farms.

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after you cut it!

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But we will just import it from countries that can produce it more cheaply.

Even if you have an increase in wages and better working conditions and willing workers, the problem is that the workers aren't where the work is and transportation costs will be astronomical.

Migrant labor for farms works great because they are willing to shack up wherever, not take sick days, travel from farm to farm and not worry about the niceties of urban living like toilets. Farmers can't pay enough to make the available labor change its current set of circumstances.

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But we will just import it from countries that can produce it more cheaply.

And that will fall apart when our current artificially-low transportation costs become more realistic. And all the folks who currently simper, "Oh local grown, isn't that just PRECIOUS!" will be laughing out the other side of their faces.

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For Massachusetts the issue is less about who's picking veggies or washing dishes, it's about who's working in the biotech labs and software farms. The H1B1 visas, the foreign students -- drive them off and the global brain drain of the past 60-70 years will begin to reverse. And similarly as we no longer have (or really never did have?) white people in this country doing the lettuce picking or ditch-digging, that same population is not going to pick up the drug production for big pharma or the coding for Google. And that's where our economy is. The language of science used to be German. After the war (WWII) it became English. Give it a few more years of this xenophobic horseshit and it will be Cantonese or Bengali or something.

So while the #daywithoutimmigrants focuses on the more numerous Latinos working in kitchens and such, the real economic impact is the #daywithoutSTEMigrants.

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H-1B. H1B1 is a different visa only for people from Chile or Singeapore (go figure).

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Jeez, you don't even have the naming nomenclature correct.

The H1B program is a grift, end to end.

I'll keep it simple for you. Two-hundred plus Disney IT workers were forced to train their H1B replacements, and then terminated:

http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/09/06/emmons-when-walt-disney-co-replace...

Somehow, the original workers were able to work in STEM, despite the handicap of being Americans. They were smart enough to be retained to train their replacements. Then Disney replaced them with poorly paid indentured servants with a visa status dependent on their employer. Were the replacement workers better than the Americans, or cheaper and more malleable?

That's the H1B program in a nutshell.

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The average obese Trump voter in West Virginia or wherever is sure as hell not going to get off their couch and pick hundreds of pounds of produce per day for a few bucks per hour.

Sounds like an excellent opportunity for fit,superintelligent blue staters to put down their IPhones and get real jobs.

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That's because we are educated, willing to relocate, and don't live in poorly run shitholes with the sanitation standards of developing countries.

I've done fieldwork. I made the effort and took the initiative to make damn sure that I would never have to go back to it.

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I am concerned that the justification for allowing undocumented immigrants to stay in this country is that our economy depends on exploiting vulnerable people on our very own soil.
Everyone in this country should be granted equal rights and protections. Nobody should be paid less than minimum wage under the table, or have to weigh the benefits and risks of taking a child to the hospital or reporting a crime.
I don't really care if we tighten border security or loosen it.

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A) this isn't really inconveniencing anyone but the employers - too small an effort.

B) no reasonable person, even my conservative family, is arguing against immigration ' just those who abuse the system or who would harm us - the president's actions may be misdirected, but they are at least superficially intended to protect us (although abuses of the H1-B and E5 systems are legion)

C) And I hear on rhe radio kids are staying home from school? So we are giving you an education worth hundreds of thousands of dollars even if you violate our laws and you CHOOSE not to take advantage of that? Kinda cutting your nose off to spite your face? The whole point is we don't check immigration status on the school bus because we WANT you to be educated if you are here.

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A) this isn't really inconveniencing anyone but the employers - too small an effort.

It's a first effort; give it time. The Montgomery bus boycott didn't have much effect on day one, either.

B) no reasonable person, even my conservative family, is arguing against immigration ' just those who abuse the system or who would harm us - the president's actions may be misdirected, but they are at least superficially intended to protect us (although abuses of the H1-B and E5 systems are legion)

How much do you know about "the system"? These are poor people, and it takes a lot of money, relative to what they have, just to file for permanent residency. Quite a lot of them are fleeing famine or violence at home, and we own some of that -- the instability in El Salvador, for instance. They can't just "go back and wait", it's a survival thing. And if you want to talk about Mexicans, they can't just go back home either - they'll get targeted by criminals, who believe that since they've been living in the US they have a bunch of money.

C) And I hear on rhe radio kids are staying home from school?

I think you might want to try to learn more about why the strike is happening before you start making up stories about it.

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1) I guess if you can get a lot of legal immigrants to back this up - because if it's restaurant workers,landscapers and field hands - it's just not a big enough base to have any impact. And if the local taqueria is closed - I'll just hit the sandwich or pizza place down the street that's making do (like my regular place today that employs mostly local kids - and a couple of immigrants).

2) I know enough - most of what you are talking about are refugees - very different status. there's a procedure for refugees. Hell - wasn't Aunt Zeituni granted refugee status (on pretty flimsy grounds). We are talking people coming here to work under the table (maybe, maybe not paying some income/SS taxes etc. - not the issue). My opinion - jobs like that should be handled like in Singapore with "guest workers". In singapore your employer posts a bond so if you violate your immigration status - the employer loses his bond. Might have to make that an individual bond here in the US because we're not an isolated island nation - but you'd have people lined up all along the Rio Grande posting bonds to get in (and yes - we can still make room for refugees).

3) Talk to WBZ - they announced that repeatedly this morning about kids skipping school.

Sorry - my grandparents followed the rules (including establishing residency in Argentina before he could come to the US). fill out the paperwork, pay the fees and get in line. If someone's going to kill/torture you for going home - there's a way around that too.

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There are no "lines" for poor, under-educated people from Central America. Other than marrying an American or having American relatives who can sponsor you (and the wait is often 10 years for a Green Card), there isn't a way in.

Put a really poor country next to a really rich country and you are going to have people here illegally. You can't just magically wish 12 million people away without collapsing the economy. Most don't want people to come here illegally, but it's the reality (and it happens in every country).

Punishing the employer is a good move. Cutting the demand would certain have an impact. Putting together a better system that allows guest workers would also make sense.

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2. I know enough

Quite obviously, you don't.

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Inquiring minds want to know

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1) I guess if you can get a lot of legal immigrants to back this up - because if it's restaurant workers,landscapers and field hands - it's just not a big enough base to have any impact.

Oh, it's a lot more than that. But it's also true, and a perfectly valid criticism, that what we've seen doesn't begin to approach the definition of a general strike. It was a one-day event and very limited in scope. A general strike is a much more far-reaching event, it takes planning and time and a lot of people willing to go all in to support it, and while people have been tossing around the term "general strike" lately, very few people know what it means, and none of the actions that have happened so far meet the description. That's not to say that there can't be a general strike, just that it will take a lot more work -- and believe me, if it happens, you won't be so dismissive.

2) I know enough - most of what you are talking about are refugees - very different status. there's a procedure for refugees.

But here's the problem: let's say you are a refugee and you get to the United States. The United States defines refugees rather narrowly -- the burden of proof is on the refugee to show that they have a "well-founded fear of persecution" based on race, membership in a particular social group, political opinion, religion, or national origin. That doesn't cover economic refugees at all, regardless of the reason why their economy got disrupted. It doesn't cover refugees from countries where it's unsafe to live generally because of chaos and lawlessness. It doesn't cover most refugees from Central America, from Mexico, from North Africa or the Middle East - most of whom are not targeted with direct persecution for the reasons listed. So you get to the United States somehow, and you have two choices: go through your so-called "procedure for refugees", and likely get denied...or fly under the radar. Your other choice, which seems to amount to "go home and wait and hope for the best", is no choice at all. If it were, THEY WOULDN'T BE HERE.

) Talk to WBZ - they announced that repeatedly this morning about kids skipping school.

Well then it's obviously completely true.

Sorry - my grandparents followed the rules (including establishing residency in Argentina before he could come to the US). fill out the paperwork, pay the fees and get in line.

Your grandparents, as far as you know, "followed the rules" as they were at the time. Mine did too -- but then, they didn't have many problems, as they were northern Europeans and welcome here. If they'd been Asian or African? Fuhgeddaboutit. Not wanted here -- as Jews weren't wanted during the Holocaust. Your grandparents got in by "following the rules" at the same time that "the rules" kept others out, and some of those others died as a result. Sorrynotsorry, it's not a virtue to have lucky grandparents, and it's not a virtue to follow rules that are rigged for you to win and for others to lose. There's another lesson you should learn from their story.

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1) Just realistic. Nobody's going to support a general strike over illegal immigration. Hell - a lot of the immigrants that did go through the process are not even keen on illegal immigration.

2) We can't save the world. We can and should do some - but we can't open our doors to everyone - in fact we can learn a lot from places like Canada, Australia and NZ that have "points" systems. Unfortunately, that pretty much rules out most poor/undecated people other than refugees - however you define them (we have lots of poor and uneducated people already here and most of them are white. A lot of people should file for refugee status from parts of Chicago these days). Australia - the size of us geographically with only a few tens of millions of people is even SENDING refugees here.

3) I know - WBZ - almost 100 years of fake news. Who should believe them? I'll ask President Trump - he of a landslide, er um 306 vote, er um 304 vote electoral college win and a popular vote winner by -3 million. Accurate - if you count votes in absolute numbers.

4) Seriously? Germans, Irish, Italians, Catholics, Jews - now all pretty mainstream all were discriminated against at times and in some places. 75 years from now nobody will have a problem with the Hispanics and Muslims either (I have no problem whatsoever as long as they obey the rules). Wasn't anywhere near as easy as "You're white - come on in". My dad's mom after paperwork and a wait got to come straight here because she had relatives living here. My grandfather had to go to Argentina following WW I and wait I believe for several years before he got to come here. To some extent you have to make your own luck in this world with patience, diligence and hard work.

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I assume you mean the EB5 system (Green Cards for investment in economically deprived areas)?

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But I've never seen anything about "deprived"areas. Maybe. All too complicated and way too much bogus crap going on.

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Most of the investment ends up in areas designated by the government as needing employment (as it's cheaper to do with the same Green Card):

Required minimum investments are:

General. The minimum qualifying investment in the United States is $1 million.

Targeted Employment Area (High Unemployment or Rural Area). The minimum qualifying investment either within a high-unemployment area or rural area in the United States is $500,000.

https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/permanent-workers/employment...

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"I'm in favor of people coming into this country legally." -- President Donald J. Trump

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Please explain how that fits with the thousands of people with valid visas and green cards that he banned from entering the country.

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Charles Draghi at Erbaluce reports:

I've been offering jobs as bussers, prep cooks, dishwashers, and over night cleaners to those US citizens who have voiced angry protest that our restaurant is closed tonight in support of the Immigrant Work Stoppage.
So far no one has accepted.

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"their stealing our jobs!.... that we don't want to do because institutional racism has instilled in us the belief that menial labor jobs are not for whites and therefore these positions are beneath us... but there stealing these jobs from us! so anger! YELLLLINNNNNG."

[editor's note: their/there/they're mix ups are intentional]

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We want blue collar jobs, but high paying ones where we don't clean messy things with food or bodily fluids on them or serve others. You can't make me join a union, either. Or move from my home town where I know who to bully.

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[Sic], dude.

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I've been offering jobs as bussers, prep cooks, dishwashers, and over night cleaners to those US citizens who have voiced angry protest that our restaurant is closed tonight in support of the Immigrant Work Stoppage.
So far no one has accepted.

In this day and age, one must offer prospective employees more in wages than EBT pays out.

Also take into consideration that passive-aggressive stunts like this that only target innocent patrons are probably only the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps there is also a no-toilet-paper-day to support the stick pile god mephooboo.

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ROFL. You mean the people who were so OUTRAGED that their burrito place would close down on a random Thursday that they decided to call up the owner and rant about his pro-immigration stance over the phone? Yeah, those poor schmucks deserve all the sympathy we can muster. You should see the size of the violin I'm playing right now.

Though you do make an interesting point about incentives to work. Right now, you're disqualified from Medicaid and a handful of other programs if you accept a minimum wage job in MA. The only way to properly incentivize people back into work would be to provide universal health coverage, independent of employment status. Let me know when you're headed down to the march for single-payer, and I'll bring the whole family down there with us.

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You should see the size of the violin I'm playing right now.

It fits in the tiniest of hands, I'm sure!

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passive-aggressive stunts like this that only target innocent patrons

Oh heavens, won't someone please think of the innocent patrons? Because god forbid for one day you can't eat out.

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Curious how that is not mentioned. I actually posted on his FB post with the same question. Have yet to have an answer from him.

If I am going to be working washing piles of dirty dishes, I want to get very good pay per hour.

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Never heard of this place, though I dine in Boston often. Since its website says it normally opens at 5 pm, I find it hard to believe that shortly after 11 am, "US citizens have voiced angry protest" that they won't open in six hours. Farce.

As for offering minimum wage jobs to those with enough money and free time to call for a reservation at 11 am, of course they didn't want to wash the dishes. To suggest the phantom "angry US citizens" are flooding the phone lines of some obscure restaurant, in far-left Boston, is too incredible to be believed.

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I've been to Erbaluce -- it's in Bay Village. Excellent food and service, though a little expensive for anything other than a special evening out for my budget. If you've never been to Erbaluce and have never even heard of it, then why are you so outraged by the decision of a PRIVATE BUSINESS OWNER to close for one day? You weren't going to eat there tonight anyway.

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You do realize that people can "voice" their objections to the restaurant in a variety of ways? I'm guessing these folks saw or heard it mentioned in the press and contacted the restaurant by email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I can pretty much guarantee none of them had ever heard of Erbaluce before.

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though I dine in Boston often

I'm sure you will find plenty of space at the Mount Vernon if Amrheins is too full.

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Good for Anna's. I do miss their big burrito's now that i live in the burbs.

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