Trump’s Mass Deportations Could Cost the Bay Area $67 Billion a Year, Report Says

As the Trump administration carries out high-profile detention and deportation efforts across the country, a new study by Bay Area researchers found that mass immigration raids in the nine counties would cost the local economy up to $67 billion a year.

The study published Wednesday by business advocacy group Bay Area Council is the first to examine the consequences of increased enforcement on the region’s roughly 478,000 undocumented immigrants, from fear and uncertainty to potential targeted arrests or widespread raids.

Undocumented immigrants make up 5% to 6% of the Bay Area’s economy, one of the largest in the world. The loss of that workforce would be a major blow, said Abby Raisz, vice president of research at the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

“This would be very different than a typical recession,” Raisz said. “This is a loss of productive capacity. You’re removing workers from an economy in a way that’s very difficult to immediately replace, especially in a high-cost region like this one.”

Political debate over immigrants’ economic contributions to the U.S. labor market has escalated under the second Trump administration, which promised the largest deportation campaign in history. Abundant research has shown that immigrants are a powerful engine for growth and innovation, expanding the workforce and increasing consumer spending, and often paying significantly into public services while frequently being excluded from benefits.

Still, proponents of greater restrictions argue that unauthorized immigration is a net strain on public resources and depresses wages for American workers, though there is substantial disagreement even among conservatives about whether that is true.

Nearly one-third of California’s residents are immigrants, including estimated 2.28 million undocumented individuals — or around 8% of the workforce. In the Bay Area, 1 in 5 immigrants is undocumented.

The researchers behind this week’s report measured deportation’s economic effects by industry, GDP, tax revenue and household impacts on mixed-status families, which includes more than 3 million Californians.

The report found that more than half of the Bay Area’s undocumented population have lived here over a decade, and one-third have lived in the region for more than 20 years.

“This is not a marginal population,” Raisz said. “These are folks that are very deeply embedded in the workforce of the Bay Area and the broader economy.”

Sanctuary policies and other local constraints could blunt the effects of large-scale enforcement in the Bay Area, the report noted. Still, it said employers and business owners across the region have already reported lower foot traffic, higher absenteeism and delays in hiring as communities with greater immigrant populations navigate mounting challenges since last year.

“The disruption that’s already happening, even without large-scale raids or deportation, also has its own slew of economic impacts,” Raisz said. “And we’re seeing that small-scale enforcement action — the fear and uncertainty that starts to ripple through communities — that alone can have millions of dollars of economic impact.”

Fred Blackwell, CEO of the San Francisco Foundation, which commissioned the report, said that much of the conversation surrounding the escalating federal immigration activities in cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago has framed it as a “moral issue and a legal issue.”

But what the report highlights, Blackwell said, is that immigration and deportation are also questions of economics.

“Economic issues require strategy, and silence is not a strategy,” Blackwell said. “We all need to be speaking up on behalf of these communities and talking about the contributions they make from an economic and cultural point of view.”

The report showed that undocumented workers earn an estimated $21.5 billion annually in the Bay Area, which generates billions in public revenue each year.

Additionally, the removal of a single undocumented primary income earner from a mixed-status household would ripple through the economy and result in average household income losses of 69%. That would be particularly devastating across Santa Clara, Alameda and Contra Costa counties, which have the highest numbers of mixed-status households, according to the report.

The study found that the region’s undocumented immigrants are highly active in the workforce — with nearly 75% participation, a higher rate than that of U.S.-born residents. Their removal would have an outsize effect on critical industries such as construction, hospitality and caregiving.

Because many of those jobs involve physically demanding work, nonstandard hours or high turnover, the workers are not easily or quickly replaced in an already tight labor market, researchers said. Disruptions in those industries, the report said, could radiate outward through supply chains, consumer spending and public budgets “in ways no sector would escape.”