After a year of insults, raids, arrests and exile, a celebration of the California immigrant
What comes next is a mystery, but I’d like to share a note of appreciation as 2025 fades into history.
If you came to Greater Los Angeles from Mexico, by way of Calexico, Feliz Navidad.
If you once lived in Syria, and settled in Hesperia, welcome.
If you were born in what once was Bombay, but raised a family in L.A., happy new year.
I’m spreading a bit of holiday cheer because for immigrants, on the whole, this has been a horrible year.
Under federal orders in 2025, Los Angeles and other cities have been invaded and workplaces raided.
Immigrants have been chased, protesters maced.
Livelihoods have been aborted, loved ones deported.
With all the put-downs and name-calling by the man at the top, you’d never guess his mother was an immigrant and his three wives have included two immigrants.
President Trump referred to Somalis as garbage, and he wondered why the U.S. can’t bring in more people from Scandinavia and fewer from “filthy, dirty and disgusting” countries.
Not to be outdone, Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem proposed a travel ban on countries that are “flooding our nation with killers, leeches and entitlement junkies.”
The president’s shtick is to rail mostly against those who are in the country without legal standing and particularly those with criminal records. But his tone and language don’t always make such distinctions.
The point is to divide, lay blame and raise suspicion, which is why legal residents — including Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo — have told me they carry their passports at all times.
In fact, thousands of people with legal status have been booted out of the country, and millions more are at risk of the same fate.
In a more evolved political culture, it would be simpler to stipulate that there are costs and benefits to immigration, that it’s human nature to flee hardship in pursuit of better opportunities wherever they might be, and that it’s possible to enact laws that serve the needs of immigrants and the industries that rely on them.
But 2025 was the year in which the nation was led in another direction, and it was the year in which it became ever more comforting and even liberating to call California home.
The state is a deeply flawed enterprise, with its staggering gaps in wealth and income, its homelessness catastrophe, housing affordability crisis and racial divides. And California is not politically monolithic, no matter how blue. It’s got millions of Trump supporters, many of whom applauded the roundups.
But there’s an understanding, even in largely conservative regions, that immigrants with papers and without are a crucial part of the muscle and brainpower that help drive the world’s fourth-largest economy.
That’s why some of the state’s Republican lawmakers asked Trump to back off when he first sent masked posses on roundups, stifling the construction, agriculture and hospitality sectors of the economy.
When the raids began, I called a gardener I had written about years ago after he was shot in the chest during a robbery attempt. He had insisted on leaving the hospital emergency room and going back to work immediately, with the bullet still embedded in his chest. A client had hired him to complete a landscaping job by Christmas, as a present to his wife, and the gardener was determined to deliver.
When I checked in with the gardener in June, he told me he was lying low because even though he has a work permit, he didn’t feel safe because Trump had vowed to end temporary protected status for some immigrants.
“People look Latino, and they get arrested,” he told me.
He said his daughter, whom I’d met two decades ago when I delivered $2,000 donated to the family by readers, was going to demonstrate in his name. I met up with her at the “No Kings” rally in El Segundo, where she told me why she wanted to protest:
“To show my face for those who can’t speak and to say we’re not all criminals, we’re all sticking together, we have each other’s backs,” she said.
Mass deportations would rip a $275-million hole in the state’s economy, critically affecting agriculture and healthcare among other industries, according to a report from UC Merced and the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.
“Deportations tend to raise unemployment among U.S.-born and documented workers through reduced consumption and disruptions in complementary occupations,” says a UCLA Anderson report.
Californians understand these realities because they’re not hypothetical or theoretical — they’re a part of daily life and commerce. Nearly three-quarters of the state’s residents believe that immigrants benefit California “because of their hard work and job skills,” says the Public Policy Institute of California.
I’m a California native whose grandparents were from Spain and Italy, but the state has changed dramatically in my lifetime, and I don’t think I ever really saw it clearly or understood it until I was asked in 2009 to address the freshman convocation at Cal State Northridge. The demographics were similar to today’s — more than half Latino, 1 in 5 white, 10% Asian and 5% Black. And roughly two-thirds were first-generation college students.
I looked out on thousands of young people about to find their way and make their mark, and the students were flanked by a sprinkling of proud parents and grandparents, many of whose stories of sacrifice and yearning began in other countries.
That is part of the lifeblood of the state’s culture, cuisine, commerce and sense of possibility, and those students are now our teachers, nurses, physicians, engineers, entrepreneurs and tech whizzes.
If you left Taipei and settled in Monterey, said goodbye to Dubai and packed up for Ojai, traded Havana for Fontana or Morelia for Visalia, thank you.
And happy new year.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
