The Brief

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.

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Erica Yee

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Bay Area Council Economic Institute analysis

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“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.

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Mikhail Zinshteyn

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Figures provided by the CA Dept. of Finance based on Dept. of Homeland Security data

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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.

After copper wire theft left the Sixth Street Bridge in darkness for years, the city of Los Angeles has hired a Pasadena-based engineering firm to restore the lighting, a move aimed at improving safety for Boyle Heights and the surrounding neighborhoods.

City officials contracted Tetra Tech to relight the bridge, which has been plagued by copper wire theft since its opening in 2022. The outages have frustrated residents and commuters who use the bridge to walk, run, bike and drive between downtown LA and the Eastside.

Aging infrastructure, copper wire theft and delayed repairs led to nearly 2,000 streetlight service requests in Boyle Heights in 2024. Nearly seven miles of copper wire have been reported stolen from the Sixth Street Bridge.

Tetra Tech began working on the project’s design in January and is scheduled to restore the wiring to all lights along the bridge, including along roadways, barriers, ramps, stairways and arches before the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games come to Los Angeles that summer, according to a Feb. 18 news release from Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s office.

The firm – which was selected by the city’s Bureau of Engineering – will fortify the pull boxes, service cabinet and conduits to protect against copper wire theft. Tetra Tech will also install a security camera system to deter vandalism and theft.

“When our streets are well-lit, our neighborhoods feel safer and more connected,” Jurado said in the news release. “The Sixth Street Bridge plays a vital role in connecting Angelenos between the Eastside and the heart of the City.”

Jurado – who pledged to look into fixing the Sixth Street Bridge lights when she was elected in 2024 – said the partnership with Tetra Tech “moves us one step closer to restoring one of the City’s most iconic landmarks as a safe, welcoming public space our communities deserve.”

According to officials, the total contract value with Tetra Tech is $5.3 million, which includes work on the Sixth Street Bridge as well as the Sixth Street PARC project, which encompasses 12 acres of recreational space underneath and adjacent to the bridge.

The PARC project will make way for sports fields, fitness equipment, event spaces and a performance stage. PARC’s grand opening is anticipated later this year.

Because the work for the PARC project and the bridge is connected, the Board of Engineers recommended using the existing PARC contract with Tetra Tech to ensure completion ahead of the 2028 Games, officials said.

The cost for the design work on the bridge alone is roughly $1 million.

On Thursday, Jurado announced that her streetlight repair crew had restored lighting and strengthened infrastructure for more than 400 streetlights across her district, including Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, and El Sereno. Next, they plan to tackle repairs in downtown L.A.

For the last 70 years, the  27th Street Bakery hasn’t just been the go-to place for people who want to spend less time in the kitchen — it’s become a staple in South Central, providing jobs and security for people living in the neighborhood.

The bakery is Black-owned and in its third generation as a business. It’s co-owned by sisters Denise Cravin-Paschal and Olympic gold-medalist Jeanette Bolden-Pickens, as well as her husband Al Pickens.

“My grandfather employed a lot of people around here as he was growing his business and so have we,” Cravin-Paschal told the LA Local. “They feel that this is a safe place to come. We have the respect of being here for 70 years and so we enjoy it.”

The bakery sits on Central Avenue, the focal point of Black Los Angeles between the 1930s and 1960s. As segregation laws were struck down, Black people in LA began to move elsewhere and took their businesses with them. The bakery, though, is still Black-owned and operating 70 years later.

Today it is considered the largest manufacturer of sweet potato pies on the West Coast, the bakery’s website states. Last year, the city and District 9 Councilmember Curren Price Jr. presented the bakery with a plaque that reads: “A Walk Down Central Avenue — A legacy of community: powered by the people and its places.”

It hangs on the wall in the bakery’s lobby along with several other photos and recognitions they’ve received over the years.

“Our goal is to keep this legacy alive and we’re celebrating 70 years of being here in business. We are so grateful to the community,” Bolden-Pickens said.

In celebration of its anniversary, a sign in the bakery says it is offering one slice of sweet potato pie for 70 cents on Saturdays starting this weekend through Oct. 31.

The bakery was a restaurant at first bringing Southern flavor to LA

The bakery began as a restaurant in the 1930s on Central Avenue founded by Harry and Sadie Patterson, according to the family and Los Angeles Conservancy. Back then, Central Avenue was the epicenter of LA’s Black community and Patterson, who came from Shreveport, Louisiana, decided to bring his Southern recipes to life in Los Angeles.

The restaurant later became a bakery in 1956, according to the bakery’s website. Patterson’s daughter Alberta Cravin and her son Gregory Spann took over the bakery in 1980. After Spann passed away, Cravin’s daughters — the sisters who are current owners — took over the family business. Five other relatives also help them out, Cravin-Paschal said.

These days, the bakery is open Tuesday through Saturday each week and the bulk of their customers are other businesses. They serve nearly 300 vendors including convenience stores like 7-Eleven, Ralphs grocery stores, Smart & Final, ARCO gas stations, restaurants and other mom-and-pop stores. Louisiana Fried Chicken has been a customer since 1980, Cravin-Paschal said.

An average delivery today is usually 45 dozen pies and they also ship orders out of state, Cravin-Paschal said.

She also told The LA Local they have six full time employees and most of them have worked for the bakery at least 25 years.

“I like working here, I like the people,” Maximina “Maxi” Rodriguez, a longtime employee, told The LA Local. After 32 years at the bakery, she said she plans to retire in June. “I’m going to miss it.”

Rodriguez said working at the bakery is a family affair for her, too. Her sister, Guadalupe Garibaldi, has worked at the bakery for over 40 years and her niece, Yoselin Garibaldi, is now a cashier and driver.

Patterson’s lessons inspired 3 generations to keep the business running

For Bolden-Pickens and Cravin-Paschal, running the bakery is a labor of love. Both told The LA Local that their grandfather taught them to stay true to the fresh ingredients they use and not to cut corners.

These lessons helped Bolden-Pickens in her life before taking over the family business. She won a gold medal as part of the U.S. 4×100 meter relay team in track and field during the 1984 Olympics.

“What I learned from being an Olympian is that it takes a lot of hard work. I learned that from my grandfather,” she said.

Bolden-Pickens said it hasn’t been easy running the business, but they’ve been able to stay afloat because of the lessons learned from their grandfather.

“I remember during the pandemic, we actually had to go to the egg farm and stand in line for a couple of hours just to get the eggs that we needed,” Bolden-Pickens said. “We use the best spices. We make our own vanilla.”

Cravin-Paschal said after the death of their brother Gregory Spann, who was the main baker for nearly two decades, they struggled for a few years to keep the recipe and taste consistent. But eventually they figured it out.

“We had a little rough spot because we all know the recipes but you have to put it together (correctly),” Cravin-Paschal said. “Now we’re back to the original taste.”

As marijuana use among teens has grown in the past decade, researchers have been trying to better understand the health risks of the drug. Now, a new longitudinal study finds that cannabis use among adolescents increases risks of being diagnosed with bipolar and psychotic disorders, as well as anxiety and depression, years later.

"This is very, very, very worrying," says psychiatrist Dr. Ryan Sultan at Columbia University, a cannabis researcher who wasn't involved in the new study published in the latest JAMA Health Forum.

Strong study design

Researchers analyzed health data on 460,000 teenagers in the Kaiser Permanente Health System in Northern California. The teens were followed until they were 25 years old. The data included annual screenings for substance use and any mental health diagnoses from the health records. Researchers excluded the adolescents who had symptoms of mental illnesses before using cannabis.

"We looked at kids using cannabis before they had any evidence of these psychiatric conditions and then followed them to understand if they were more likely or less likely to develop them," says Dr. Lynn Silver, a pediatrician and researcher at the Public Health Institute, and an author of the new study.

They found that the teens who reported using cannabis in the past year were at a higher risk of being diagnosed with several mental health conditions a few years later, compared to teens who didn't use cannabis.

Teens who reported using cannabis had twice the risk of developing two serious mental illnesses: bipolar, which manifests as alternating episodes of depression and mania, and psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia which involve a break with reality.

Now, only a small fraction — nearly 4,000 — of all teens in the study were diagnosed with each of these two disorders. Both bipolar and psychotic disorders are among the most serious and disabling of mental illnesses.

"Those are the scarier conditions that we worry about," says Sultan.

Silver points out these illnesses are expensive to treat and come at a high cost to society. The U.S. cannabis market is an industry with a value in the tens-of-billions — but the societal cost of schizophrenia has been calculated to be $350 billion a year.

"And if we increase the number of people who develop that condition in a way that's preventable, that can wipe out the whole value of the cannabis market," Silver says.

Depression and anxiety too

The new study also found that the risk for more common conditions like depression and anxiety was also higher among cannabis users.

"Depression alone went up by about a third," says Silver, "and anxiety went up by about a quarter."

But the link between cannabis use and depression and anxiety got weaker for teens who were older when they used cannabis. "Which really shows the sensitivity of the younger child's brain to the effects of cannabis," says Silver. "The brain is still developing. The effects of cannabis on the receptors in the brain seem to have a significant impact on their neurological development and the risk for these mental health disorders."

Silver hopes these findings will make teens more cautious about using the drug, which is not as safe as people perceive it to be.

"With legalization, we've had a tremendous wave of this perception of cannabis as a safe, natural product to treat your stress with," she says. "That is simply not true."

The new study is well designed and gets at "the chicken or the egg, order-of-operations question," says Sultan. There have been other past studies that have also found a link between cannabis use and mental health conditions, especially psychosis. But, those studies couldn't tell whether cannabis affected the likelihood of developing mental health symptoms or whether people with existing problems were more likely to use cannabis — perhaps to treat their symptoms.

But by excluding teens who were already showing mental health symptoms, the new study suggests a causal link between cannabis use and later mental health diagnoses. Additional research is needed to understand the link fully.

'Playing with fire'

Sultan, the psychiatrist and researcher at Columbia University, says the study confirms what he's seeing in his clinic — more teens using cannabis who've developed new or worsening mental health symptoms.

"It is most common around anxiety and depression, but it's also showing up in more severe conditions like bipolar disorder and psychosis," he says.

He notes that mental health disorders are complex in origin. A host of risk factors, like genetics, environment, lifestyle and life experiences all play a role. And some young people are more at risk than others.

"When someone has a psychotic episode in the context of cannabis or a manic episode in the context of cannabis, clinicians are going to say, 'Please do not do that again because you're you're you're playing with fire,'" he says.

Because the more they use the drug, he says the more likely that their symptoms will worsen over time, making recovery harder.

"What we're worried about [is if] you sort of get stuck in psychosis, it gets harder and harder to pull the person back," says Sultan. "Psychosis and severe mood disorders, particularly bipolar disorder are like seizures in your brain. They're sort of neurotoxic to your brain, and so it seems to be associated with a more rapid deterioration of the brain."

Some electric bikes in California could soon require license plates under a proposed state bill aiming to address the rise in electric bike related injuries.

AB 1942 or the E-bike Accountability Act, would apply exclusively to Class 2 and Class 3 electric bikes.

Class 2 bikes can be operated without peddling until it reaches the speed of 20 mph.

Class 3 bikes reach a max speed of 28 mph; motor assist could only kick in with peddling.

The bill would also require owners to carry proof of ownership and would direct the Department of Motor Vehicles to establish a registration process. It was introduced by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan of Orinda in Contra Costa County earlier this month.

E-bike injuries spiked 18-fold between 2018 and 2023, according to state traffic data.

The bill may be heard in committee March 16.