What comes subsequent is a thriller, however I’d prefer to share a observe of appreciation as 2025 fades into historical past.
When you got here to Larger Los Angeles from Mexico, by the use of Calexico, Feliz Navidad.
When you as soon as lived in Syria, and settled in Hesperia, welcome.
When you have been born in what as soon as was Bombay, however raised a household in L.A., glad new yr.
I’m spreading a little bit of vacation cheer as a result of for immigrants, on the entire, this has been a horrible yr.
Underneath federal orders in 2025, Los Angeles and different cities have been invaded and workplaces raided.
Immigrants have been chased, protesters maced.
Livelihoods have been aborted, family members deported.
With all of the put-downs and name-calling by the person on the prime, you’d by no means guess his mom was an immigrant and his three wives have included two immigrants.
President Trump referred to Somalis as rubbish, and he questioned why the U.S. can’t deliver in additional folks from Scandinavia and fewer from “filthy, soiled and disgusting” international locations.
To not be outdone, Homeland Safety chief Kristi Noem proposed a journey ban on international locations which might be “flooding our nation with killers, leeches and entitlement junkies.”
The president’s shtick is to rail principally towards those that are within the nation with out authorized standing and notably these with prison data. However his tone and language don’t all the time make such distinctions.
The purpose is to divide, lay blame and lift suspicion, which is why authorized residents — together with Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo — have instructed me they carry their passports always.
In truth, hundreds of individuals with authorized standing have been booted overseas, and thousands and thousands extra are prone to the identical destiny.
In a extra advanced political tradition, it could be less complicated to stipulate that there are prices and advantages to immigration, that it’s human nature to flee hardship in pursuit of higher alternatives wherever they may be, and that it’s doable to enact legal guidelines that serve the wants of immigrants and the industries that depend on them.
However 2025 was the yr during which the nation was led in one other path, and it was the yr during which it turned ever extra comforting and even liberating to name California residence.
The state is a deeply flawed enterprise, with its staggering gaps in wealth and earnings, its homelessness disaster, housing affordability disaster and racial divides. And California just isn’t politically monolithic, regardless of how blue. It’s obtained thousands and thousands of Trump supporters, lots of whom applauded the roundups.
However there’s an understanding, even in largely conservative areas, that immigrants with papers and with out are a vital a part of the muscle and brainpower that assist drive the world’s fourth-largest economic system.
That’s why among the state’s Republican lawmakers requested Trump to again off when he first despatched masked posses on roundups, stifling the development, agriculture and hospitality sectors of the economic system.
When the raids started, I known as a gardener I had written about years in the past after he was shot within the chest throughout a theft try. He had insisted on leaving the hospital emergency room and going again to work instantly, with the bullet nonetheless embedded in his chest. A consumer had employed him to finish a landscaping job by Christmas, as a gift to his spouse, and the gardener was decided to ship.
Once I checked in with the gardener in June, he instructed me he was mendacity low as a result of though he has a piece allow, he didn’t really feel secure as a result of Trump had vowed to finish short-term protected standing for some immigrants.
“Folks look Latino, and so they get arrested,” he instructed me.
He stated his daughter, whom I’d met twenty years in the past after I delivered $2,000 donated to the household by readers, was going to exhibit in his identify. I met up together with her on the “No Kings” rally in El Segundo, the place she instructed me why she needed to protest:
“To indicate my face for many who can’t converse and to say we’re not all criminals, we’re all sticking collectively, we now have one another’s backs,” she stated.
Mass deportations would rip a $275-million gap within the state’s economic system, critically affecting agriculture and healthcare amongst different industries, in response to a report from UC Merced and the Bay Space Council Financial Institute.
“Deportations have a tendency to lift unemployment amongst U.S.-born and documented staff by decreased consumption and disruptions in complementary occupations,” says a UCLA Anderson report.
Californians perceive these realities as a result of they’re not hypothetical or theoretical — they’re part of day by day life and commerce. Almost three-quarters of the state’s residents imagine that immigrants profit California “due to their exhausting work and job expertise,” says the Public Coverage Institute of California.
I’m a California native whose grandparents have been from Spain and Italy, however the state has modified dramatically in my lifetime, and I don’t suppose I ever actually noticed it clearly or understood it till I used to be requested in 2009 to deal with the freshman convocation at Cal State Northridge. The demographics have been much like right this moment’s — greater than half Latino, 1 in 5 white, 10% Asian and 5% Black. And roughly two-thirds have been first-generation faculty college students.
I seemed out on hundreds of younger folks about to seek out their approach and make their mark, and the scholars have been flanked by a sprinkling of proud dad and mom and grandparents, lots of whose tales of sacrifice and craving started in different international locations.
That’s a part of the lifeblood of the state’s tradition, delicacies, commerce and sense of risk, and people college students at the moment are our lecturers, nurses, physicians, engineers, entrepreneurs and tech whizzes.
When you left Taipei and settled in Monterey, stated goodbye to Dubai and packed up for Ojai, traded Havana for Fontana or Morelia for Visalia, thanks.
And glad new yr.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
