The Bay Area Council just released its March 2026 “economic impact” study warning that stepped-up ICE enforcement under President Trump will supposedly crater the regional economy by as much as $67 billion in GDP and $8.4 billion in annual tax revenue. Translation: mass deportations of illegal immigrants are bad for business because cheap labor is good for the bottom line. Same song, different administration. I landed in Los Angeles in 1990 when California still felt like the land of opportunity. Thirty-five years later I’ve watched it become a single-party cautionary tale of open borders, sanctuary policies, and fiscal self-immolation. This report isn’t economic analysis. It’s coastal-elite cope dressed in footnotes.

The numbers they gloss over tell the real story. Illegal immigration suppresses wages for working-class Americans—especially in construction, hospitality, and agriculture, the very sectors the Bay Area Council pretends to champion. The Federation for American Immigration Reform puts the annual net cost to California taxpayers at approximately $22.8 billion—covering education, healthcare, welfare, and law enforcement for illegal immigrants alone—rising to over $30 billion once you tally U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. That is not “diversity is our strength.” It is a straight transfer from California taxpayers to employers who dodge payroll taxes and labor standards. The Bay Area Council’s own report acknowledges the workforce. It just skips the part where someone else is subsidizing........

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