It hasn’t happened yet, but California is bracing for a demographic and economic hit under President Donald Trump’s multi-pronged effort to limit the entry of people born abroad and deport those already in the U.S.
In fact, during the last Trump administration, California’s population declined in part because immigration to the state slowed down after the White House put up increased obstacles to enter the U.S., according to the state's chief demographer, though COVID-19 didn’t help. The Newsom administration is worried about history repeating itself enough to cite Trump’s immigration policies as an economic risk in the state budget forecasts.
Key business sectors, including hospitality and construction, rely on the labor of workers in the U.S. without legal authorization, who themselves are a small portion of California’s immigrant population. The state’s leading tech companies, major drivers of state wealth, overwhelmingly employ highly educated people born abroad.
And all these people help California maintain its population and its status as the state with the most electoral college votes during presidential elections.
A full third of the state’s prime working-age population is made up of immigrants, including immigrants in the country without authorization. That latter group represents roughly a tenth of the state’s workers, said Giovanni Peri, an economics professor at UC Davis who studies the economic impact of immigrants. And despite popular rhetoric, California workers living here without legal authorization fill jobs that few legal residents want.
Most of the undocumented workers in California have been here for a long time — an average of 15 years, Peri said.
“They have family and they have kids who are American citizens normally,” Peri said. “So these are people very well integrated in the economy of California.”
More than a quarter of the state’s population was born abroad; double the national average. Nearly half of California’s children were born to an immigrant parent and more than half of California’s immigrants are naturalized U.S. citizens.
Plus, California’s immigrant community is diverse: 49% are originally from Latin American countries and 41% from Asia. For the past decade, more immigrants from Asia came to California than from Latin America.
After Trump directed a pause in immigration raids at farms, hotels and restaurants two weeks ago, days later he doubled down again on those industries and targeted major cities in a social media post.
“We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center,” he wrote.
A large business group, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, released a statement this month that said it’s “deeply concerned by recent enforcement actions that have disrupted the well-being of our communities, compromised public safety, and threatened the stability of our local economy.”
Here are three ways an immigration crackdown could affect California.
Congressional seats and the electoral college
California is on track to lose at least one more congressional seat after the U.S. Census counts all the residents in the country in 2030 — and Trump’s policies on legal and illegal immigration could further erode the state’s electoral college dominance.
For much of the last three decades, more residents in California have moved to other states than out-of-state residents have moved to California. But the overall population loss to out-migration is offset by the sheer number of immigrants attracted to California. Though the trend has slowed down lately, the state is home to the largest number of immigrants in the country — about a fifth of the total U.S. immigrant population.
“If that immigration stops, then that's going to have some real consequences for our population growth and ultimately for our representation, for sure,” said Eric McGhee, a demographer and politics researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California.
By representation, he means both the number of House seats California is apportioned after the census and, by extension, the number of electoral college votes the state is given (which is calculated by adding a state’s House seats and U.S. Senate seats).
Because Congress capped the number of House members to 435 nearly a century ago, a state basically needs to grow its population at a higher rate than the national average to gain seats. California didn’t do that in the previous decade; as a result, it lost a House seat for the first time in state history in 2021.
The electoral math concerning immigration in national elections is nuanced, though. People in the U.S. without legal authorization are counted in the U.S. Census. So, if Trump’s immigration raids lead to a large decline of people in the country without proper legal status, that affects California’s overall population. But Florida and Texas, the largest states that now regularly support Republican candidates in presidential elections, also have large numbers of people without proper legal status.
California has an estimated 1.8 million here without authorization, down a million from a decade ago. Texas has 1.6 million and Florida 1.2 million. That means those states have a slightly larger percentage of people here without proper legal status than California, according to tallies by the Pew Research Center.
But those states are also domestic net-migration winners; they gain more people from out of state than they lose to other states.
One major reason California loses so many people is the high cost of housing. McGhee says high living costs are also increasingly a drag on the state’s attractiveness to new international arrivals.
Bottomline, “if you're interfering with immigration flows to California, that's going to hurt the state's growth,” said McGhee. “Unless we can somehow start to attract people back to the state from other states and reverse that out-migration.”
But “that doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon,” he added.
California relies on undocumented labor
Workers without proper legal status “have allowed the economy of California to grow in many sectors,” Peri said. They work in fields that U.S. legal residents generally don’t want, either because they have higher levels of education, want higher incomes or have retired.
A report released last week by UC Merced and the business-focused think tank Bay Area Council Economic Institute estimated that removing all undocumented immigrants from California would decrease economic activity by $275 billion, or 9% of the state’s GDP. That figure includes both direct labor by undocumented workers and the economic output generated by their and their employer businesses’ spending.
In construction, mass deportations would curb GDP by 16%, and in agriculture, 14%, the report’s authors found. Undocumented immigrants make up more than a quarter of the workforce in both industries.
They also found about 11% of the state’s small business owners are undocumented, as well as about 700,000 of the state’s homeowners — about a third of the state’s undocumented population.
“Most of this population has very deep and longstanding ties to the state of California,” said Abby Raisz, research director at the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. “They’re really embedded in our economy, both in dollars and cents and institutional knowledge” on job sites.
Three-quarters of U.S. registered voters — including 59% who backed Trump — said they agreed that immigrants without proper authorization mostly fill jobs that American citizens don’t want, The Pew Research Center reported in 2024.
California adults without legal authorization work at much higher rates than the overall workforce. Around 85% of California adults without authorization to stay in the country work, Peri said; the comparable figure for the state’s overall working age population is around 62%.
“They don't have access to any of the welfare support that a citizen will have, because they are undocumented, and so the only source of income for them is really work,” Peri said. That’s in spite of the fact that they contribute billions of dollars in tax revenue to local, state and federal governments, according to the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
If Trump’s immigration raids and deportation efforts force these workers to leave, “companies will start leaving California because they cannot find the construction workers, the farm workers; hotel and hospitality will become smaller because you don't have this type of worker,” said Peri. And companies are limited by how much more they can pay workers to attract new employees before the price of their goods exceeds what buyers can afford. That affects U.S.-born workers and legal residents, as well, who’d have fewer job openings as companies stall their growth plans.
But undocumented immigrants’ concentration in low-wage industries has also made them vulnerable. State labor officials have found undocumented immigrants to be particularly at risk of wage theft and other exploitation, and have focused their enforcement efforts in industries that disproportionately employ such workers such as car washes, garment factories and janitorial services.
How immigrants drive California's economy
Peri said that when we talk about immigration overall, there’s an even larger positive effect on the economy, since half of recent immigrants are college-educated and so are big players in founding companies and helping lead California in science and technology.
“And so the wage impact of immigration in total, there is no evidence that is depressing wages,” he said.
An immigration crackdown may prompt a growing number of would-be or recent immigrants to reconsider California or the U.S., said experts with the California Department of Finance, a state agency in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office.
They might be thinking, “why am I going to invest and build something in California or the United States?” said Somjita Mitra, chief economist in the forecasting division of the Department of Finance.
Case in point: two-thirds of Silicon Valley workers were born abroad, according to a 2025 report by Joint Venture Silicon Valley. Tech companies and the high compensation they pay workers are a chief source of state revenue for California.
There’s evidence that Trump’s policies slows down immigration to California. In the 2015-16 fiscal year, about 211,000 immigrants moved to California, according to data from the Department of Finance. By 2018-19, a couple of years into Trump’s first term but before the COVID-19 pandemic, that figure drops to 159,000 individuals.
“Some of it is slowing down what's happening at foreign embassies, making them come multiple times for multiple vetting sessions, slowing their processing down,” said Walter Schwarm, the finance department’s chief demographer.
The figure rebounded in the latter half of Joe Biden’s presidency to more than 220,000 new international arrivals. It does not include immigrants without proper legal status.
And the vast majority of immigrants are between the ages of 28 and 40, “so they really form a core of the labor force,” he added, especially as more U.S.-born Californians retire.
The country lost out on at least $335 billion in economic growth because of a slowdown in foreign-born workers between 2016 and 2022, a period that includes Trump’s first term and the COVID-19 pandemic, found Madeline Zavodny, an economist who wrote a 2024 paper for the National Foundation for American Policy.
Trump’s immigration sweeps and the fear they induce are also prompting immigrants to shop and spend less, which is a drain on the economy. “If there's a lot of uncertainty, if there's a lot of confusion, it kind of makes people not want to go out and spend their money,” Mitra said.
“The fact of the matter is, a lot of the revenue that is being generated, and a lot of the economic growth that is being generated in this country … is coming from the contributions of legal immigrants,” Schwarm said.
Asked if she’s worried Trump’s immigration policies will have a detrimental effect on California’s economy, Mitra said “yes, I am worried about that.”
CalMatters reporter Jeanne Kuang contributed to this story.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
