The estimates indicate that President Donald Trump’s efforts to restrict immigration are having profound effects on California’s population.

The flow of immigrants to California was halved this year compared to last year, new estimates show, throttling the state’s post-pandemic population recovery.

California’s net immigration — the estimated number of people moving from outside the U.S. to California minus the number leaving the U.S. from the state — was less than 130,000 from July 2024 to July 2025. From 2023 to 2024, the state saw a net flow of nearly 260,000 immigrants, according to new data from the California Department of Finance.

The decline was seen across the state, with net immigration to San Francisco falling from 6,300 to 3,800 and even bigger drops in the Central Valley.

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The estimates, which mostly include immigrants accessing legal pathways and social services, indicate that President Donald Trump’s efforts to restrict immigration are having profound effects on California’s population. From July 2024 to July 2025, the state grew by just 0.05%, compared to almost 0.6% over the previous yearlong period. 

California has historically depended on immigration to counterbalance its population loss to other parts of the country. During Trump’s first term, his immigration policies contributed to California’s population decline, which experts said damaged the state’s economy and threatened its representation in Congress. 

Within California, the drop in net migration was most significant in the Central Valley and Imperial County, agricultural regions that rely heavily on migrant workers. For example, Fresno County’s net immigration in the 2023-24 period was nearly 12,000. Over the past fiscal year, the estimated flow was just 750 people. 

But even coastal metros saw dramatic declines in net immigration. In San Mateo County, the in-flow dropped by more than 50%. 

Click here to read the full article in the SF Chronicle

It hasn’t happened yet, but California is bracing for a demographic and economic hit under President Donald Trump’s multi-pronged effort to limit the entry of people born abroad and deport those already in the U.S.

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In fact, during the last Trump administration, California’s population declined in part because immigration to the state slowed down after the White House put up increased obstacles to enter the U.S., according to the state’s chief demographer, though COVID-19 didn’t help. The Newsom administration is worried about history repeating itself enough to cite Trump’s immigration policies as an economic risk in the state budget forecasts.

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Key business sectors, including hospitality and construction, rely on the labor of workers in the U.S. without legal authorization, who themselves are a small portion of California’s immigrant population. The state’s leading tech companies, major drivers of state wealth, overwhelmingly employ highly educated people born abroad.

And all these people help California maintain its population and its status as the state with the most electoral college votes during presidential elections.

A full third of the state’s prime working-age population is made up of immigrants, including immigrants in the country without authorization. That latter group represents roughly a tenth of the state’s workers, said Giovanni Peri, an economics professor at UC Davis who studies the economic impact of immigrants. And despite popular rhetoric, California workers living here without legal authorization fill jobs that few legal residents want.

Most of the undocumented workers in California have been here for a long time — an average of 15 years, Peri said.

“They have family and they have kids who are American citizens normally,” Peri said. “So these are people very well integrated in the economy of California.”

More than a quarter of the state’s population was born abroad; double the national average. Nearly half of California’s children were born to an immigrant parent and more than half of California’s immigrants are naturalized U.S. citizens.

Plus, California’s immigrant community is diverse: 49% are originally from Latin American countries and 41% from Asia. For the past decade, more immigrants from Asia came to California than from Latin America.

After Trump directed a pause in immigration raids at farms, hotels and restaurants two weeks ago, days later he doubled down again on those industries and targeted major cities in a social media post.

“We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center,” he wrote.

A large business group, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, released a statement this month that said it’s “deeply concerned by recent enforcement actions that have disrupted the well-being of our communities, compromised public safety, and threatened the stability of our local economy.”

Here are three ways an immigration crackdown could affect California.

Congressional seats and the electoral college

California is on track to lose at least one more congressional seat after the U.S. Census counts all the residents in the country in 2030 — and Trump’s policies on legal and illegal immigration could further erode the state’s electoral college dominance.

For much of the last three decades, more residents in California have moved to other states than out-of-state residents have moved to California. But the overall population loss to out-migration is offset by the sheer number of immigrants attracted to California. Though the trend has slowed down lately, the state is home to the largest number of immigrants in the country — about a fifth of the total U.S. immigrant population.

“If that immigration stops, then that’s going to have some real consequences for our population growth and ultimately for our representation, for sure,” said Eric McGhee, a demographer and politics researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California.

By representation, he means both the number of House seats California is apportioned after the census and, by extension, the number of electoral college votes the state is given (which is calculated by adding a state’s House seats and U.S. Senate seats).

Because Congress capped the number of House members to 435 nearly a century ago, a state basically needs to grow its population at a higher rate than the national average to gain seats. California didn’t do that in the previous decade; as a result, it lost a House seat for the first time in state history in 2021. 

The electoral math concerning immigration in national elections is nuanced, though. People in the U.S. without legal authorization are counted in the U.S. Census. So, if Trump’s immigration raids lead to a large decline of people in the country without proper legal status, that affects California’s overall population. But Florida and Texas, the largest states that now regularly support Republican candidates in presidential elections, also have large numbers of people without proper legal status.

California has an estimated 1.8 million here without authorization, down a million from a decade ago. Texas has 1.6 million and Florida 1.2 million. That means those states have a slightly larger percentage of people here without proper legal status than California, according to tallies by the Pew Research Center.

But those states are also domestic net-migration winners; they gain more people from out of state than they lose to other states.

One major reason California loses so many people is the high cost of housing. McGhee says high living costs are also increasingly a drag on the state’s attractiveness to new international arrivals.

Bottomline, “if you’re interfering with immigration flows to California, that’s going to hurt the state’s growth,” said McGhee. “Unless we can somehow start to attract people back to the state  from other states and reverse that out-migration.”

But “that doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon,” he added. 

California relies on undocumented labor

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