What comes next is a mystery, but I'd like to share a note of thanks as 2025 passes into history.
If you came to Greater Los Angeles from Mexico, via Calexico, Merry Christmas.
If you have ever lived in Syria and settled in Hesperia, welcome.
If you were born in what was once Bombay, but raised a family in Los Angeles, happy new year.
I'm spreading some Christmas cheer because for immigrants, overall, this has been a horrible year.
Under 2025 federal orders, Los Angeles and other cities have been invaded and workplaces raided.
Immigrants have been persecuted and protesters have been gassed.
Livelihoods have been aborted and loved ones deported.
With all the slights and insults from the man at the top, you would never guess that his mother was an immigrant and that among his three wives were two immigrants.
President Trump referred somalis like garbage, and wondered why the United States can't bring more people from Scandinavia and fewer from “dirty, dirty and disgusting” countries.
Not to be left behind, Homeland Security Chief Kristi Noem proposed a travel ban on countries that are “flooding our nation with murderers, leeches and addicts to rights.”
The president's trick is to primarily criticize those in the country without legal status and, in particular, those with criminal records. But their tone and language do not always make such distinctions.
The point is to divide, assign blame and generate suspicion, which is why legal residents (including Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo — They have told me that they carry their passports at all times.
In fact, thousands of people with legal status have been expelled from the country and millions more are at the same risk.
In a more evolved political culture, it would be simpler to stipulate that immigration has costs and benefits, that it is human nature to flee difficulties in search of better opportunities wherever they are, and that it is possible to enact laws that meet the needs of immigrants and the industries that depend on them.
But 2025 was the year the nation was steered in another direction, and it was the year it became increasingly comforting and even liberating to call California home.
The state is a deeply flawed enterprise, with its staggering gaps in wealth and income, its homelessness catastrophe, its housing affordability crisis, and its racial divisions. And California is not politically monolithic, no matter how blue it is. It has millions of Trump supporters, many of whom applauded the raids.
But there is an understanding, even in largely conservative regions, that legal and undocumented immigrants are a crucial part of the muscle and brainpower that helps drive the world's fourth-largest economy.
That is why some of the states Republican lawmakers called on Trump to back down when he first sent masked groups on raids, stifling the construction, agriculture and hospitality sectors of the economy.
When the raids started, I called a gardener I had written about years ago after he was shot in the chest during an attempted robbery. He had insisted on leaving the hospital emergency room and returning to work immediately, with the bullet still embedded in his chest. A client had hired him to complete a gardening job before Christmas, as a gift for his wife, and the gardener was determined to deliver.
When I spoke to the gardener in June, he told me he was in hiding because, although he has a work permit, he didn't feel safe because Trump had promised to end temporary protected status for some immigrants.
“People look Latino and they get arrested,” he told me.
He said that his daughter, whom he had met two decades ago when he gave $2,000 donated to the family by readers, was going to demonstrate on his behalf. I ran into her at the “No Kings” rally in El Segundo, where she told me why she wanted to protest:
“To show my face to those who cannot speak and say that we are not all criminals, we all stick together, we support each other,” he said.
Mass deportations would destroy a $275 million hole in state economycritically affecting agriculture and healthcare, among other industries, according to a report from UC Merced and the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.
“Deportations tend to increase unemployment among workers born and documented in the United States due to reduced consumption and the interruption of complementary occupations,” says a UCLA University report.
Californians understand these realities because they are neither hypothetical nor theoretical: they are part of everyday life and commerce. Nearly Three-quarters of state residents believe immigrants benefit California. “due to their hard work and job skills,” says the Public Policy Institute of California.
I'm a California native whose grandparents were from Spain and Italy, but the state has changed dramatically in my lifetime, and I don't think I ever saw it clearly or understood it until I was asked in 2009 to speak at the freshman convocation at Cal State Northridge. The demographics were similar to today: more than half Latino, 1 in 5 white, 10% Asian and 5% black. And about two-thirds were first-generation college students.
I watched as thousands of young people were about to find their way and make their mark, and the students were flanked by a group of proud parents and grandparents, many of whose stories of sacrifice and longing began in other countries.
That is part of the soul of the state's culture, cuisine, commerce and sense of possibility, and those students are now our teachers, nurses, doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs and technological geniuses.
If you left Taipei and settled in Monterey, said goodbye to Dubai and packed up for Ojai, you changed Havana for Fontana or Morelia for Visalia, thank you.
And happy new year.
