After a year of insults, raids, arrests and deportations, the celebration of the California immigrant

What’s next is a mystery, but I’d like to share a note of gratitude as 2025 fades into history.

If you are coming to Greater Los Angeles from Mexico, by way of Calexico, Feliz Navidad.

If you once lived in Syria, and settled in Hesperia, you are welcome.

If you were born in what used to be Bombay, but raised a family in LA, happy new year.

I’m spreading some holiday cheer because for immigrants, overall, this has been a bad year.

Under federal orders in 2025, Los Angeles and other cities were attacked and workplaces attacked.

Immigrants have been chased, protesters have struck.

Lives are withdrawn, loved ones are driven away.

Despite all the snobbery and snobbery of the top man, you would never guess that his mother is an immigrant and his three wives include two immigrants.

President Trump is referring to him The Somalis like trash, and wondered why the US couldn’t bring in more people from Scandinavia and less from “dirty, dirty and disgusting” countries.

Shouldn’t be over, Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem proposed banning travel from the countries “who flood our nation with killers, vermin and health workers.”

The president’s goal is to strongly criticize those in the country who have no legal authority, especially those with criminal records. But his tone and language don’t always make such a difference.

The point is to divide, blame and raise suspicions, that’s why legal citizens – including Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo – they told me that they carry their passports with them at all times.

In fact, thousands of people with legal conditions have been deported, and millions more are at risk of the same fate.

In a more advanced political culture, it would be easy to posit that there are costs and benefits to immigration, that it is human nature to avoid hardship in pursuit of better opportunities wherever they may be, and that laws can be enacted that provide for the needs of immigrants and the industries that depend on them.

But 2025 was the year that the nation was led elsewhere, and it was the year that it became comforting and liberating to call California home.

The state is a deeply flawed enterprise, with staggering gaps in wealth and income, its own homelessness crisis, housing affordability crisis and racial inequality. And California is not a political monolithic, however green it may be. It has millions of Trump supporters, many of whom applauded the rally.

But there is an understanding, even in conservative states, that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are an important part of the muscle and brain power that helps drive the world’s fourth-largest economy.

That’s why some of the state Republican lawmakers called on Trump to withdraw when he started sending masked items in the fields of collecting funds, disrupting the economic sectors of construction, agriculture and tourist extortion.

When the raid started, I called a farmer I wrote about years ago after being shot in the chest while trying to rob a man. He had insisted that he leave the hospital’s emergency room and return to work immediately, the bullet still lodged in his chest. The client had hired him to finish landscaping for Christmas, as a gift for his wife, and the farmer was willing to deliver.

When I went to the manager of the garden in June, he told me that he was sleeping because even though he had a work permit, he did not feel safe because Trump had vowed to end temporary protection for some immigrants.

“People look for a Latino, and they get arrested,” he told me.

He said his daughter, whom I had met twenty years ago when I brought $2,000 donated to the family by students, would show her name. I met him at the “No Kings” rally in El Segundo, where he told me why he wanted to protest:

“To show my face to those who cannot speak and to say that we are not all criminals, we all stick together, we turn our backs on each other,” he said.

Mass deportations can go through a $275-million hole in the state economywhich mainly affect agriculture and health care among other industries, according to a report from UC Merced and the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

“Dismissals tend to increase unemployment among US-born and documented workers by reducing consumption and disrupting related jobs,” the statement said. UCLA Anderson report.

Californians understand these facts because they are not hypothetical or theoretical – they are part of everyday life and commerce. Almost three-quarters of the state’s citizens believe that immigrants benefit California “because of their hard work and their professional skills,” said the Public Policy Institute of California.

I’m a native Californian whose grandparents came from Spain and Italy, but the situation has changed a lot in my life, and I don’t think I ever really saw it or understood it until I was asked in 2009 to speak at a freshman convocation at Cal State Northridge. The demographics were similar to today – more than half Latino, 1 in white, 10% Asian and 5% Black. And nearly two-thirds were first-generation college students.

I looked at thousands of young people about to find their way and make a mark, and the students were flanked by a sprinkling of proud parents and grandparents, many of whom began their stories of adventure and longing in other countries.

That’s part of the life of the state’s culture, food, commerce and sense of possibility, and those students are now our teachers, nurses, doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs and tech whizzes.

If you left Taipei and settled in Monterey, said goodbye to Dubai and packed up in Ojai, traded Havana for Fontana or Morelia for Visalia, thank you.

And happy new year.

steve.lopez@latimes.com