After a year of insults, raids, arrests and exile, a celebration of the California immigrant
What will happen next is a mystery, but as 2025 passes into history, I would like to share a note of appreciation.
Feliz Navidad if you came from Mexico to Greater Los Angeles via Calexico.
If you once lived in Syria and settled in Hesperia, welcome.
If you were once born in Mumbai but raised a family in Los Angeles, happy new year.
I’m spreading some holiday cheer because this has been a terrible year for immigrants in general.
In 2025, Los Angeles and other cities were occupied and businesses raided under federal orders.
Immigrants were chased, protesters were attacked.
Their livelihoods were halted, their loved ones were deported.
For all the put-downs and name-calling from the man at the top, you’d never guess that his mother was an immigrant and his three wives were two immigrants.
President Trump mentioned Somalis as garbage, and wondered why the United States couldn’t bring more people from Scandinavia and fewer people from Scandinavia. “dirty, dirty and disgusting” countries.
Not to be outdone, Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem has suggested a travel ban on the following countries:To drown our nation with murderers and leeches and authority addicts.
The president’s move is mostly to rail against those without legal status in the country, especially those with criminal records. However, style and language do not always make such distinctions.
The point is to divide, accuse and doubt; therefore including legal residents Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo – they told me that they always carry their passports with them.
In fact, thousands of people with legal status have been expelled from the country and millions more are at risk of suffering the same fate.
In a more developed political culture, it would be simpler to stipulate that immigration has both costs and benefits, that it is human nature to escape difficulties in pursuit of better opportunities wherever they may be found, and that it is possible to enact laws that serve the needs of immigrants and their dependent industries.
But 2025 was the year when the nation was steered in another direction, and the year when calling California home became more comforting, even liberating, than ever before.
The government is a deeply flawed institution, with staggering gaps in wealth and income, a homelessness scourge, a housing affordability crisis, and racial disparities. And California, no matter how blue it is, is not a political monolith. There are millions of Trump supporters, many of whom applauded the roundups.
But even in largely conservative regions, there is an understanding that immigrants, documented and undocumented, are an essential part of the muscle and brainpower that helps keep the world’s fourth-largest economy afloat.
Therefore, some states Republican lawmakers ask Trump to step back when he first sent out masked teams to collect them, overwhelming the construction, agriculture and hospitality sectors of the economy.
When the raids started, I called a gardener I wrote about years ago after being shot in the chest during a robbery attempt. He insisted on leaving the hospital emergency room with the bullet still in his chest and returning to work immediately. A client had hired him to complete a landscaping job by Christmas as a gift for his wife, and the gardener was determined to deliver.
When I met with the gardener in June, he told me that even though he had a work permit, he didn’t feel safe because Trump had promised to end temporary protected status for some immigrants.
“People look Latino and they get arrested,” he told me.
He told me that his daughter, whom I met when I handed over $2,000 donated to the family by readers twenty years ago, would perform on his behalf. I met him at the “No to Kings” rally in El Segundo and he told me why he wanted to protest:
“To show my face to those who cannot speak and to say that we are not all guilty, that we are all connected, that we have each other’s back,” he said.
Mass deportations cause great destruction $275 million gap in the state economyIt severely impacts agriculture and healthcare, among other sectors, according to a report by UC Merced and the Bay Area Council Economics Institute.
“Deportations tend to increase unemployment among U.S.-born and formal workers due to reduced consumption and disruptions in complementary occupations,” he says. UCLA Anderson report.
Californians understand these truths because they are not hypothetical or theoretical; part of daily life and commerce. Almost Three-quarters of state residents believe immigrants benefit California “because of their hard work and business skills,” says the Public Policy Institute of California.
I’m a California native whose grandparents came from Spain and Italy, but the state has changed dramatically over the course of my life, and I don’t think I really saw or understood that clearly until I was asked to speak at the freshman convocation at Cal State Northridge in 2009. The demographics were similar to today’s; More than half are Latino, 1 in 5 are white, 10% are Asian and 5% are Black. And roughly two-thirds were first-generation college students.
I looked at thousands of young people about to find their way and make their mark, and alongside the students were proud parents and grandparents, many of whose stories of sacrifice and longing began in other countries.
It’s part of the lifeblood of the state’s culture, cuisine, commerce and sense of possibility, and these students are now our teachers, nurses, doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs and tech geniuses.
If you left Taipei and settled in Monterey, if you said goodbye to Dubai, packed up your belongings and headed for Ojai, if you traded Havana for Fontana or Morelia for Visalia, thank you.
And happy new year.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
