President Trump’s promised crackdown on illegal immigration threatens deportation for millions of immigrants living in the U.S. without permission. How would that affect California and the Bay Area?
Recent studies based on U.S. Census Bureau helps to put the numbers in perspective.
Nationally, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. without permission tripled from 3.5 million in 1990 to 12 million in 2005, then dropped to 10.2 million in 2020 before climbing back to 11 million in 2022, according to a Pew Research Center report last year. California, the most populous U.S. state with 39 million residents, has long been home to the most immigrants living in the country illegally, with 1.8 million, the report said.
But the Golden State’s share of the national total has been shrinking since 2019 as the population of immigrants living illegally in the U.S. has grown faster in the country’s other large-population states, especially Texas, with an estimated 1.6 million, and Florida, with 1.2 million. Since 2019, the number grew by 85,000 in Texas and 400,000 in Florida but dropped by 120,000 in California, the report said.
While the Pew report did not break down figures within the state, research based on 2019 Census data by the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that studies immigration, indicated some 471,000 immigrants live in the U.S. illegally in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area, including 359,000 in Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa and San Mateo counties. Los Angeles County, the state’s most populous, hosts 951,000 immigrants living in the country illegally.
“California has the largest unauthorized population in the United States, which has existed for a long time,” said Michelle Mittelstadt, a communications director at the Migration Policy Institute. Most of those residents have been living in California for a long time, not recent arrivals. The state’s declining numbers could reflect a combination of growing immigrant networks in other states and California’s high housing costs, she said.
“While there’s been a lot of focus on recent border arrivals, etc., the reality is, the majority of the time, the population is one that’s been here 10 years, 15 years, 20 years and has just not had a pathway to legal status,” Mittelstadt said, “If you look in the California profile, and you look at things like employment and homeownership rate and the number of U.S.-born children in the home, you will see that for the most part, this is a population that has significant ties to the United States.”
Around California, those immigrants make up the biggest share of county populations in the state’s farming regions, where many find employment. The Monterey-San Benito county region’s 67,000 immigrants living in the country without permission in what is known as the Salad Bowl of the World is more than 13%, the highest rate in the state. In Santa Barbara County, known for its wineries, and Merced and Madera counties in the Central Valley, the proportion in each was nearly 10%.
The Monterey County Farm Bureau, representing a $4.3 billion agriculture industry, said in a statement this month that regardless of its farmworkers’ immigration status, they are a critical workforce and considered “essential” during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowed to continue working while many workplaces were closed. Echoing Mittelstadt, the bureau noted that some of those immigrants “have resided in our communities for decades.”
“Farming depends on a stable and reliable workforce, one not under threat,” said Norm Groot, the farm bureau’s executive director. “We appreciate the farmworkers’ vital contributions to the national food supply as essential workers. We cannot change the fact that farmworkers were considered essential during the pandemic; the circumstances remain the same, these are essential workers.”
In the Bay Area, Santa Clara County, the region’s largest with 1.9 million residents, also had the most living in the country illegally, 134,000, or 6.9% of the population. The proportion is a bit higher, nearly 7.2%, in San Mateo, where the coast is mostly devoted to agriculture.
While Mexico has long been the home country for the vast majority of those living in the U.S. without permission, the population has been diversifying over the last 15 years, Mittelstadt said. California had increasing numbers coming from Central America: Salvadorans, Hondurans, Guatemalans and, more recently, Venezuelans and Ukrainians.
“There’s been a diversification of nationalities at the U.S. border, in California and in other parts of the United States,” Mittelstadt said.
In the Bay Area, those in the country illegally predominantly hail from Mexico, with significant numbers from Asia and Latin America. San Francisco was the only county where most of those immigrants came from a different country: China.
Mittelstadt said the large proportion from Mexico reflects historic ties and noted that a growing proportion of the workforce has been legalized through the H-2A seasonal visa for agricultural workers, though workers in the country illegally still comprise a sizable share of the workforce.
“California and Mexico share a border, but you also have long historic ties where California agriculture, the California wine industry and other industries in California have significantly relied on unauthorized workers for a period of decades now,” Mittelstadt said.
The Pew report said that as of 2022, immigrants in the U.S. illegally represented 3.3% of the total population and 23% of the foreign-born population. The numbers peaked at more than 12 million in 2007 when Congress killed the controversial proposed Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act that aimed to provide both increased border enforcement and a path to citizenship for those in the U.S. illegally. Numbers fell to 10 million in 2019 but have risen since, though unauthorized border crossings fell sharply in the past year.
Whether Trump’s crackdown leads to fewer residents in the country illegally remains to be seen, Mittelstadt said.
“So I think it’s too early to say what the likely effects are, but the reality is that people make the decision to migrate, and this is a very serious life decision,” Mittelstadt said. “Many are unlikely to be permanently deterred.”