Trump's immigration raids are wreaking havoc on California's economy and schools

San Francisco Chronicle​

3 days ago

The Trump administration's unrestrained assault on immigrants has battered California's economy and driven down attendance at its schools, a pair of recent reports contend.
Taken together, the studies by researchers at UC Merced and Stanford University assert that President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda is having cascading effects that extend beyond California's under-siege immigrant communities.
Examining monthly population totals from the U.S. Census Bureau, UC Merced found that nearly 465,000 California workers withdrew from the labor force the week of June 8, when federal immigration authorities descended on Los Angeles-area neighborhoods and work sites to arrest nearly 2,800 people.
The drop in workers depressed private-sector employment by 3.1% from May. In the past four decades, only the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Recession saw greater monthly declines in private-sector workers, said associate sociology professor Edward Orozco Flores, the report 's lead author and faculty director at UC Merced's Community and Labor Center, a public research institution based in the San Joaquin Valley.
The data can't explicitly say which workers stayed home or were laid off and furloughed, and doesn't indicate which industries experienced the greatest declines. But the effects were not limited to Southern California, Flores said.
'Geographically, there was no statistical difference between L.A. and the rest of the state,' he said. The reason, he surmised, was the immigration enforcement tactics on display in the state.
Along with sending federal immigration agents and thousands of military troops to Los Angeles, the Trump administration has dispatched masked immigration agents to health clinics, schools, home improvement stores and immigration courts in other parts of the state, including San Francisco, where protesters clung to an unmarked ICE van leaving a courthouse earlier this month.
'What's become clear is this administration is making a remarkable spectacle around immigration enforcement,' Flores said. 'The majority of it (the worker loss) seems some kind of response to a very visible display of immigration enforcement.'
Trump's California crackdown exacted a geo-specific toll in the world's fifth-largest economy, the UC Merced report shows. While the state's labor force declined significantly, the U.S. as a whole experienced a half-percent increase of roughly 563,000 workers between May and June.
Most of the evaporated workers in California — 271,541, or 58% — were American citizens. Flores said there are several reasons why this would be the case, and they revolve around how interwoven the immigrant population is into the state economy.
When crops go unharvested by predominantly immigrant farmworkers, the rest of the agricultural supply chain is paralyzed. When immigrants stop shopping at supermarkets and retail stores, managers reduce their employees' hours. When the immigrants who make up a significant proportion of in-home caregivers are too afraid to leave their homes, the working adults in those homes also can't go to work.
'We have long known that noncitizens do not work in a vacuum,' Flores said. 'When noncitizens are not working, it harms the entire supply chain.'
Gov. Gavin Newsom noted the implications for California's economy earlier this month, when he called for an end to the raids in Los Angeles.
'Instead of targeting dangerous criminals, federal agents are detaining U.S. citizens, ripping families apart, and vanishing people to meet indiscriminate arrest quotas without regard to due process and constitutional rights that protect all of us from cruelty and injustice,' Newsom said in a July 7 statement. 'Their actions imperil the fabric of our democracy, society, and economy.'
Even before Trump's recent escalation in California, parents in the state's agricultural epicenter were keeping their children home from school at alarmingly irregular rates in response to heightened immigration enforcement, according to a Stanford report released in June.
On Jan. 7 — a day after Congress certified Trump's election victory — Border Patrol agents from the agency's El Centro sector conducted an unusual immigration sweep 300 miles north of their post in rural Kern County. Their Operation Return to Sender resulted in 78 arrests and about 1,000 detentions, criticism by Biden administration officials, an ACLU lawsuit and a spike in student absenteeism at southern valley school districts touched by the dragnet.
Stanford Graduate School of Education professor Thomas S. Dee examined three years of daily attendance figures from five school districts in four counties — Fresno, Kern, Kings and Tulare — whose districts serve more than 500,000 students, more than 70% of whom are Hispanic. He found that, in January and February, absences jumped by an average of 22% across all the districts and by about 30% among the youngest students — those in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade.
'That's a period where kids are learning really critical foundational skills, such as how to read,' Dee said.
As with the economy, the effects are manifesting with nonimmigrant students and families.
Jesus Martinez, executive director of the Central Valley Immigrant Integration Collaborative, said the Fresno-based nonprofit's educational partners have reported widespread fears among all their students, including U.S.-born students with immigrant parents and friends. 'It extends beyond the undocumented individual,' he said.
Some 5.5 million U.S.-born children live with a parent who is an unauthorized immigrant, according to a Center for Migration Studies analysis of census data.
The California Legislature has considered 23 immigration enforcement-related bills this year, seven of which concern schools. Bills to deny access to federal immigration authorities to schools if they don't have a warrant or a court order and to require schools to notify parents and staff when immigration authorities are on school grounds require two-thirds support to pass.
Dee said public schools are still grappling with a post-pandemic knot of chronic absenteeism, sagging enrollment and declining funding, problems he expects the raids to exacerbate. He said fall enrollment figures will help indicate how California's schools, whose funding is tied to enrollment, responded to the Trump administration's immigration incursions.
'What we're seeing could eventually become reduced enrollment if families flee the region,' he said. 'There are reasons to be concerned.'
Dee also acknowledged the Trump administration would likely be untroubled by this result, as another one of its priorities is dismantling the public education system.
'It seems consistent with other ways in which the administration has been creating disruptions and even chaos in education,' he said, noting the administration's 'evisceration' of the Department of Education and its threats to Title I funding, intended to address achievement gaps among lower-income students.
As for what happens next, Flores pointed to the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Along with adding as much as $6 trillion to the national debt, Trump's signature domestic policy achievement will supercharge immigration enforcement by $170 billion and turn U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country's largest law enforcement agency.
'No one has a crystal ball, but I think it would be reasonable to expect that this trend will continue and possibly even worsen,' Flores said. 'If this is the effect we're seeing due to the escalation of June 8 and we can expect further escalations, it is difficult to imagine that things simply go back.'