What Happens in San Diego When Immigration Takes a Nosedive?

By Lori Weisberg and Alexandra Mendoza / The San Diego Union-Tribune / March 29, 2026

For much of the last decade, a steady, often robust flow of immigrants into the county has been critical to bolstering San Diego’s sometimes sluggish population growth as more and more locals packed their bags and moved to other parts of the country.

Not so anymore.

Newly released population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal the dramatic demographic impacts of the current administration’s crackdown on immigration and deportations, which are now contributing to overall population declines and slowdowns across California and throughout the country.

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Where a year earlier, San Diego County’s population grew by nearly 8,000 from July 1, 2023, to July 1, 2024 — thanks to a healthy influx of immigrants — it fell by nearly 5,300, to 3.28 million in 2025, reversing a post-pandemic rebound. The change is due almost entirely to the monumental shift in immigration policies last year that contributed to a stunning 65% drop in San Diego’s foreign arrivals — the single largest decline in 15 years.

San Diego’s net international migration from across the globe totaled 6,135 last year. A year earlier, immigration was nearly three times that, with 17,655 more people arriving in San Diego from outside the U.S. than leaving for other countries. It’s also notable that these new population estimates reflect only the first six months of President Donald Trump’s second term in office when he started making good on his promise to aggressively secure the border and send hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants back to their home countries.

On his first day in office, Trump signed a series of executive orders focusing on the border, including eliminating the CBP One appointment system that had permitted asylum seekers to enter the country with parole after legally presenting themselves at a U.S. port of entry for screening. He also resumed construction of the U.S.-Mexico border fence and deployed troops to reinforce border barriers.

It didn’t take long for the number of migrant encounters at the border to plummet following a year in which the San Diego Border Patrol sector was among the busiest along the U.S.-Mexico border. Such encounters within the San Diego sector decreased by 90% from January 2025 to January 2026, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Apprehensions had already been dropping before that due to stricter rules on asylum put into place at the end of President Joe Biden’s term.

The demographic fallout from the dramatic decline in foreign arrivals has been widespread. Nine out of 10 U.S. counties, from Los Angeles to Miami, experienced lower immigration levels last year, compared to the year prior, according to the Census Bureau. And even more consequential is the outsized impact that immigration restrictions had on population across the country: Of the 2,066 counties that grew between 2023 and 2024, nearly 8 in 10 saw their growth either slow or reverse direction in 2025, the bureau reported.

In California, the large drops in immigration were equally, if not more, remarkable. Each of the state’s 58 counties saw a drop in the number of foreign-born arrivals, with 30 of those counties experiencing population declines, the Census Bureau said. A year earlier, just 18 recorded population losses.

While a modest population loss of 5,000 people in a year isn’t especially consequential for a county the size of San Diego, a continuing decline in immigration could have serious ramifications for the county’s economy.

No matter what side of the fraught immigration debate you land on, demographers and economists agree that a reliable flow of young immigrants is critical to the workforce, especially as declining birth rates, an aging population and high living costs shrink the labor pool.

It is, in effect, a demographic perfect storm in San Diego as all three growth engines — birth rates, domestic migration and immigration — weaken simultaneously.

“All these forces are largely invisible to the public because the population over time has been pretty stable,” said long-time demographer Dowell Myers, professor emeritus in public policy at USC. “But beneath the surface, your population has been propped up by immigration for years, and if you pull out the prop, watch what happens. You’ll have problems finding workers for anything — restaurants, day care, finding a gardener, hospital workers.

“And if that flow of immigrants is cut off permanently, San Diego’s in big trouble.”

San Diego economist Daniel Enemark echoes Myers’ concerns, pointing out that when the population and labor force contract, so, too, does the economy.

“It’s decidedly bad news,” Enemark, chief economist of the San Diego Regional Policy and Innovation Center, said of the downturn in foreign-born arrivals. “The size of our economy is simply the number of workers times the productivity of those workers. So when the productivity goes down, or when the number of workers goes down, the economy shrinks.

“And people who come as immigrants typically are people who are coming to work to make more money so that they can support their families, and they are, on average, hard-working people who are going to fill important roles in our economy. Not having those people here is not good.”

Pedro Ríos, director of the U.S./Mexico Border Program at the American Friends Service Committee, believes that the slowdown in immigration to San Diego County may be partly due to the “domino effect” of increased immigration raids, as images of these operations spread around the world. Those, in turn, he said, sent a clear message to migrants considering coming to the United States as well as visitors.

It has hurt Judah Strausberg’s roofing and remodeling company, which he says has struggled to find qualified construction workers amid Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and continued deportations. He reports a 60% drop in his San Diego business, attributing the decline to Trump’s anti-immigration measures.

“Foreign workers, especially in our trade, come to this country with a sense of opportunity, knowing that if they work hard enough, they will do well,” said Strausberg, who immigrated from France in 2008 and is now a partner in Peak Builders & Roofers. “But when you see a decline in the foreign workforce, you see fewer people offering themselves for the trade, and the quality also goes down, and prices are going up because there is more demand for the same type of work, which is more scarce.

“Because of that, we are seeing a decline in home improvement work from residential homeowners. My employees from Mexico, Guatemala are really hard-working, they work long hours, they’re high quality, and we’re very proud to employ them. And now we see less of them, so the ones who are here are demanding more pay because they know now that they can get it.”

For much of the past 15 years, San Diego County’s population has grown at a very modest rate, but that started to change in the first year of the pandemic when borders were closed and tens of thousands of residents moved away. Since then, population growth began to return, albeit slowly. But with that post-pandemic rebound now stalled, the county’s population has returned to what it was in 2016.

“If San Diego was growing at a really rapid rate, we might think that is a good thing,” noted Myers. “But it’s growing at a stagnant rate, so I think slowing down is not a good thing at all, not for anybody.”

Some population loss, though, may not necessarily be an inherently bad thing, suggests Eric McGhee, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.

“San Diego County is not Detroit in the 1970s,” he said. “It’s not losing population because its economy is collapsing. It’s declining because immigration has been cut off as a policy matter and also a high cost of living that makes it hard for people to move here. But San Diego and California still have a dynamic economy that’s been growing a lot in recent years.”

In the Census Bureau’s latest series of population estimates, it has updated its methodology to capture real-time fluctuations in immigration. The newest data, which represents both legal and illegal immigration, accounts for recent trends like repatriations and Department of Homeland Security removals. The bureau also sourced data from surveys conducted by Mexico.

Other data, particular to San Diego County, tend to reinforce the population figures produced by the Census Bureau. From January to mid-October of last year, ICE’s San Diego field office, which covers San Diego and Imperial counties, made 4,934 immigration arrests. That far surpasses the 764 arrests made in all of 2024, according to figures obtained by the Deportation Data Project via a public information request and analyzed by the Union-Tribune.

While the number of removals within ICE’s San Diego field office last year has not been made public, the Union-Tribune was able to access information provided to Rep. Mike Levin last month during a meeting with ICE leadership in San Diego. According to that information, the San Diego field office conducted nearly 13,000 removals last year. During the 2024 fiscal year, there were 6,319 removals, according to ICE’s website.

Tom K. Wong, an associate professor of political science and the founding director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at UC San Diego, noted that the recent estimates released by the Census Bureau are just one set of data among others needed to figure out the implications of Trump’s policies.

“Aggressive immigration enforcement has played a role in some families’ decisions to leave, so I think that that part is true,” he said. “But again, there are other reasons why San Diego’s population may have declined and why other border cities’ populations may have declined.”

San Diego economist Ray Major downplays the impacts of declining immigration, pointing out that the far more concerning issue is the continuing exodus of residents, who far outnumber those who are moving here. There is little evidence, he said, of local and state efforts to stem the flow.

“Yes, a lot of the Trump policies are keeping the population from growing, but you still have some growth in foreign migration,” Major said. “The bigger threat is the continued out-migration or brain drain, if you will, of people in California and San Diego who are going to other areas in the U.S. These people are choosing to pack up and leave because San Diego is no longer offering the opportunities they used to offer.

“It’s good we have people coming in to take the low-paying jobs, but you’re losing a lot of the higher-paying jobs and they pay the majority of the taxes.”

Demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution and Beth Jarosz, senior fellow with Georgetown University, contributed to this report.