.A County Without Immigrants

Two years ago, Leticia Ruvacalba opened La Misma Taqueria in Plaza Vigil, the tiny business park in the heart of Watsonville’s downtown corridor.

The little restaurant is often busy, and by all accounts Ruvacalba and husband Mario are successful members of the community.

But with incoming President Donald Trump’s promises to go after undocumented immigrants and begin mass deportations on his first day back in office, that life has been thrown into turmoil.

Ruvacalba is a naturalized U.S. citizen, but Mario only recently got his green card. Their two children, 5 and 6, attend a local school. It is unclear what will happen when Trump reclaims power.

Because Mario is La Misma’s primary cook, Ruvalcaba is unsure whether she can run the business by herself if he is deported.

“For me, I’m just in the middle,” she says. “What am I going to do if something like that happens? We have a business. I would have to make a very hard decision.”

Ruvalcaba has lived in Watsonville for 35 years, and has long felt like a part of the community. But that has changed in recent years, she says.

This includes hearing her kids describe increasing incidents of bullying at school.

“It’s been really hard, because I’ve been seeing so many things,” she says. “I’ve seen a lot of violence lately. It just hurts me, what Donald Trump is doing. I just wish he would change that. Life would be much better.”

Trump says his focus will be on immigrants who have been embroiled in the justice system, but according to immigrationimpact.com, his plans could include tens of thousands of immigrants who have been in the U.S. for more than a decade.

Staggering Cost

If Trump’s plans come to full fruition, they could have massive financial impacts on the state. According to the American Immigration Council, some 10.4 million immigrants call California home, with a combined spending power of $382.7 billion. That population pays roughly $151.3 billion in taxes annually.

That is in addition to the estimated $315 billion it will cost to deport more than 13 million people.

According to U.S. Senator Alex Padilla, undocumented immigrants make up nearly 14 percent of all construction workers and around 42 percent of the state’s agricultural workers.

Local law enforcement throughout Santa Cruz County have said they will not cooperate with federal immigration officials if they come to enforce deportation orders.

The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors took a stance last month and passed a resolution stating the county’s supportive stance on its immigrant residents and reaffirming its status as a “sanctuary county.”

Supervisor Felipe Hernandez drafted the resolution with Supervisor Justin Cummings. Watsonville passed a similar ordinance in 2017 when Hernandez was a city council member there, and the Santa Cruz City Council approved one of their own.

As part of the resolution, county staff was directed to work with nonprofits to find ways to strengthen resources and to protect immigrant communities.

Hernandez said that, in addition to protecting residents, it’s important to consider the financial impact of deportation, with California’s economy built largely on agriculture.

“And the backbone is the workforce, and that workforce is immigrants,” Hernandez said. “So it’s imperative that we also protect our economy.”

Chilling Effect

The unknown ramifications of Trump’s plans have had a profound impact on the community.

“There is lots of fear,” says Community Bridges CEO Ray Cancino. “People are very genuinely afraid of what’s going to come next and what’s going to change.”

Cancino says Trump’s fiery rhetoric and hardline stance on immigration is having a “chilling effect,” in many cases discouraging people from properly caring for themselves.

Cancino says he has seen a 30% decline in people applying for programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medi Cal and Medicare, because they are scared they’ll be snared by immigration authorities.

“Individuals will stop going to the doctor and stop seeking additional support that is bringing health and wellbeing into their households,” he says. “And I think that for me is the number-one concern. The rhetoric spills over into individuals self-selecting themselves out of services that benefit themselves and their families.”

Most people who are here illegally, Cancino says, want to find a pathway to legal citizenship. But most do not have the ability to wade through years of red tape to make that happen.

“The reality is that most folks cannot operate in that way,” he says.

Cancino says that approximately one-third of the population in Monterey County is undocumented, while in Santa Cruz County about 8%–roughly 20,000—are here illegally.

It is too early to speculate about what impact the new immigration enforcement policies will have, says Claudia Magallon, Santa Cruz County Immigration Project Directing Attorney.

But it is vital for everyone to learn their rights.

This includes the right to remain silent if approached by an immigration officer, and to ask for an attorney.

“It’s the government’s job to prove they are here illegally,” she says.

In addition, there is no requirement to open the door for an immigration officer if there is no warrant signed by a judge.

Residents can also attend the Immigration Project’s presentations with topics such as naturalization and know your rights.

Supervisor Luis Alejo says the Monterey County Board of Supervisors has approved an Immigration Rights Ad Hoc Committee, which at its first meeting included more than 50 stakeholders, such as the Mexican consul general and members of the agriculture community, as well as representatives from hospitality, education, healthcare, labor and public safety.

The committee’s intent is to “bring local stakeholders together to solicit input, facilitate communication, and prepare for any massive federal immigration enforcement actions within Monterey County, and to utilize county resources to educate and advocate our immigrant communities,” Alejo says.

Padilla, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Safety, has criticized Trump’s plans, which he says will “separate spouses and rip parents away from their U.S. citizen children, while causing massive economic hardship.”

Half a Trillion

Undocumented workers represent serious dollars

By Mark Kreidler / Capital & Main

In the days following President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, I reached out to a longtime Northern California family farmer to gauge his level of concern.

Trump has, after all, already made full-throated declarations that his administration will conduct the largest deportation of undocumented residents in U.S. history. That should resonate in a place like California, with its estimated 1.8 million undocumented immigrants — and it certainly would shake up a state agriculture industry in which nearly half of all workers are undocumented.

But the farmer, who asked not to be identified to avoid political conflict with business partners, was unruffled. A self-described social moderate and fiscal conservative, he and his family have spent generations in the business. While his own seasonal employees are on work visas, his understanding of the industry’s historical reliance on undocumented workers runs deep, through direct experience, colleagues and a seat on the board of an agriculture lending institution.

He knows the stakes. Even at a time when some farmers use more authorized workers than ever, the industry overall remains heavily reliant on undocumented immigrants.

“I suspect it’ll be like it always has been: If you’re undocumented but stay out of trouble, not much is going to happen,” he told me. “Dragging hard-working people out of here does not go over well.”

That is hardly a poetic response. It does, however, have the ring of truth.

Trump’s notion to mass deport nearly 5% of the U.S. workforce is a recipe for such economic wreckage that it feels impossible. But that doesn’t mean those who study immigration and try to shape policy don’t take him seriously.

“It is unlikely that a large share of the unauthorized immigrant population will be deported quickly,” said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research for the Economic Policy Institute. “But there’s a lot the Trump 2.0 administration can do to remove a high number fast.”

Among the possibilities: Trump’s administration could go after immigrants who have received a final order of removal or are in the country under temporary protected status (TPS), which is usually extended to those whose home countries are experiencing problems that make it difficult or unsafe for them to return. Those nations include Venezuela, El Salvador and Haiti.

Costa, a visiting scholar at the University of California Davis’ Global Migration Center, also suggested that Trump could adjust federal policy to expand temporary work visa programs — one way to assuage employers, by theoretically replacing deported undocumented workers with those possessing a legal but short leash to remain in the country.

“Those visas give employers a lot of power and control over workers because their visa status is tied to the employer,” Costa said. “They cannot easily change jobs. And if they get fired, they become deportable, which keeps them from complaining about substandard working conditions or from [trying to join] a union.”

But all of that presupposes that the Trump administration would first locate and then expel hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers in California alone. On both counts, experts say, that’s a longshot.

Jamshid Damooei, executive director of the Center for Economics of Social Issues at California Lutheran University, has been studying the economic impact of undocumented immigrants in the state for years. To Damooei, the numbers tell the story.

According to the center’s analysis, undocumented immigrants are the source of more than half a trillion dollars of products in California, either by direct, indirect or induced production levels. Their work adds up to nearly 5% of the state’s gross domestic product, or GDP.

And while 46% of the state’s agricultural workforce is undocumented, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. For example, the center’s report found that in Los Angeles County, 28.7% of the construction workforce is undocumented, along with 17.5% in manufacturing, 16% in wholesale trade and more than 15% in retail trade.

“How could L.A. County function with a significant share of its vital workforce being deported?” Damooei said. “In my county, Ventura, 70% of farmworkers are undocumented. In Santa Barbara it’s closer to 80%. Then there is construction, manufacturing, transportation. … Look, this is just incredibly powerful.”

Employers aren’t likely to give up that kind of workforce willingly, especially considering how much less they generally pay undocumented workers than others. That’s one reason the Northern California farmer sounded relatively confident that, all political rhetoric aside, the status quo will hold.

None of this answers the larger questions of what Trump really wants or how his administration would achieve it. But even setting aside the sheer inhumanity of a mass deportation policy, the financial equation makes the idea untenable.

According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants paid almost $100 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022. More than a third of those taxes went to fund programs the immigrants are barred from using, like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance.

Six states raised more than $1 billion in tax revenue from undocumented immigrants that year, the institute found. The leader of the pack? California, at $8.5 billion (followed by Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey). And in 40 states, including California, undocumented immigrants paid higher state and local tax rates than the top 1% of households.

“Undocumented immigrants are not a source of depletion of our tax revenue — they subsidize our benefits,” Damooie said. “They are not the takers of our tax revenue but the makers, who receive very little in return.”

Damooie and others argue that a path toward citizenship, not deportation, ought to be the goal. That’s not a likely scenario over the next four years.

In the meantime, the Northern California farmer said, “These workers are mostly just going to keep working.” It is work destined to be continued in the shadows — where it’s almost always been.

This story was produced by Capital & Main (capitalandmain.com).