Chef Creole owner Wilkinson “Ken” Sejour says Americans do not want to work, and he is saying it while trying to rehire an entire staff he lost when the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. The line came in a clip that has been circulating since this week, and it landed on a lot of people sideways, because the man saying it is a Haitian Bahamian restaurateur who built one of the most recognized Black owned restaurant groups in Miami on the backs of the exact workers who are now being pushed out of the country.
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Start with what TPS actually is, because the acronym gets thrown around without anyone explaining it. Temporary Protected Status is a federal designation that lets people from countries considered too dangerous to return to live and work legally in the United States while that danger lasts. It is not citizenship and it is not a green card. It is a work permit and a shield from deportation that gets renewed in chunks, and it can be taken away. For Haitians, it was taken away. On August 5, a federal judge lifted the last order blocking the rollback, leaving as many as 350,000 Haitians in this country exposed to arrest and deportation. Immigration experts have called a status loss for a group that size unprecedented in modern American history.The Chef Creole owner did not wait for the deadline to feel it, because his employees did not wait either. He lost four people first. He told Local 10 he tried to tell them there was a short extension on the table, and they told him they were not interested in gambling on it. They said the administration was not operating on the rule of law, it was operating on an agenda, and they were not going to stand around being made to look like criminals in front of other people. Then they were gone. Eventually the losses moved up the org chart until his entire management layer across his Miami locations had walked out the door.
That is where the labor math comes in, and it is worth breaking down because restaurant margins are thin enough that a few percentage points decide whether a location survives. Sejour budgeted his cost of labor at about 23 and a half percent of revenue. Replacing that many people at once, in a market where the people who know the food are leaving the country, pushes it toward 27 or 28 percent. He has said plainly that his net profit shrinks, his prices go up, and the customer feels it. Two of his restaurants may close.
Then the fear reached the dining room. On a recent Sunday, ICE agents detained a man riding a scooter just outside the Chef Creole location on Northwest 54th Street in Little Haiti. Someone recorded it from near the drive thru, the video traveled, and it traveled attached to a claim that ICE had raided the restaurant. It had not. The correction never catches the rumor. Sejour said the message people received was that his business was not a safe place to eat, and they stopped coming. So he is short on staff and short on customers at the same time.
There is one more layer here that the Chef Creole owner has raised himself, and it is the part with no clean answer. The State Department currently has Haiti under a Level 4 advisory, the highest one there is, telling American citizens not to travel there because of crime, kidnapping, terrorism and civil unrest. The same government issuing that warning is preparing to return hundreds of thousands of people to that country. Archbishop of Miami Thomas Wenski went to Washington to lobby senators on a House bill that would extend TPS protections for Haitians three more years. Nothing has moved.
Sejour also told CBS Evening News something that has been following him around online all week. He voted for Donald Trump in 2024. His reasoning was that Trump was a businessman and would therefore make business decisions. Asked on camera whether he regretted it, he said yes without stalling.
That is the context his “Americans do not want to work” comment is sitting inside, and it is why the reaction has been split. Some people hear a business owner naming a real hiring problem. Others hear a man who is short on staff because immigration policy removed his staff, and who is now describing the replacement labor pool as unwilling rather than describing the wages, the hours and the conditions that come with restaurant work. Both readings are available in the same sentence.
Chef Creole is not a new operation. Sejour opened the first one, a takeout counter on Northeast 78th Street, in 1992 with his late brother Jude Pierre. Anthony Bourdain filmed there in 2006 for the second season of No Reservations and ate the Caribbean seafood alongside Sejour. Miami New Times named the place best conch fritters in the city the following year. It has been a Little Haiti anchor for more than three decades, and right now the Chef Creole owner is describing it as something he might not be able to keep open.
