Immigrants stay home, and their absence reverberates

It first spread on social media, rippling through immigrant communities like the opposite of fear and rumor: a call to boycott. In the New York region and around the country, many cooks, carpenters, plumbers, cleaners and grocery store owners decided to answer it and not work Thursday as part of a national “

The protest called for immigrants, whether naturalized citizens or undocumented, to stay home from work or school, close their businesses and abstain from shopping. People planned for it in restaurant staff meetings, on construction sites and on commuter buses, but the movement spread mostly on Facebook and via WhatsApp, the messaging service. No national group organized the action.

“It’s like the Arab Spring,” said Manuel Castro, the executive director of NICE, the New Immigrant Community Empowerment, which works primarily with Hispanic immigrant day laborers in New York City. “Our members were coming to us, asking what the plan was. Frankly, it kind of came out of nowhere.”

But what began as a grass-roots movement quickly reached the highest levels of federal government. In Washington, the Pentagon warned its employees that a number of its food concessions, including Sbarro’s, Starbucks and Taco Bell, were closed because immigrant employees had stayed home and that they could expect longer lines at restaurants that were open.

Restaurants, from San Francisco to Phoenix to Washington, D.C., were some of the most visible spots affected, with well-known chefs closing some of their eateries for the day in support. Rick Bayless, the Chicago chef and owner of the Frontera Grill, closed several of his restaurants and said he would give a portion of the revenues from others to an immigrant rights group.

“What really makes our country great is the diversity we experience here,” Bayless said in an interview. “I can’t say enough about the lack of respect and the fear-mongering and hate-mongering that I’m sensing around us these days.”

Some people felt that the support for immigrants who are undocumented was wrongheaded.

“Of course, nobody wants to do without immigrants, they are what made America,” Sarah Crysl Akhtar, 67, a writer in Lebanon, New Hampshire, said. “But there is a difference between legal immigrants and illegal aliens.”

Some schools and child-care centers across the country experienced a drop in attendance.

At KIPP Austin Comunidad, a majority-Hispanic charter school in Austin, Texas, one teacher posted on Twitter that only seven of her 26 students came to school Thursday.

“Some of our school buses were coming to school with two and four children on them,” said Sarah Gonzales, a second-grade bilingual teacher at the school. “Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

By the end of the day, the KIPP Austin Public Schools network executive director, Steven Epstein, said only 60 percent of students attended its 10 schools with 5,000 students. Usually the attendance rate is 98 percent or above.