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 it.
I’ve spent thirty years structuring private credit deals, underwriting subprime lending, and managing factoring operations. I underwrote real risk every day. Labor markets flooded with low-skilled illegal workers drive down compensation for native-born Americans with high-school educations or less. That is not xenophobia. It is Econ 101. Harvard economist George Borjas has documented the wage-suppression effect exhaustively. Thomas Sowell spent decades explaining it to anyone paying attention. My own experience coaching youth sports in South Orange County showed me the human side: American kids competing for entry-level jobs while employers looked the other way on paperwork.
The report’s timing is comedy gold. Tom Homan and ICE are finally flooding the zone in sanctuary cities after years of deliberate non-enforcement. Memphis told the story plainly. The Memphis Safe Task Force—combining ICE, the Tennessee Highway Patrol, the National Guard, and local police—produced a 27% drop in overall Part I crimes and pushed murders below 200 for the first time since 2019. Compared to 2023, violent crime fell 30%. Carjackings dropped 48%. Yet Bay Area elites clutch their pearls because enforcing federal law might disrupt the underground economy propping up their restaurants, landscaping crews, and Silicon Valley support staff. Spare me.
This is the same crowd that cheered Gavin Newsom’s AB 539, which capped rates on consumer loans between $2,500 and $10,000. That law promptly killed regulated subprime lending in California and left borrowers with worse options—pawnbrokers, overdraft roulette, or unlicensed sharks. Remove the illegal labor subsidy and suddenly businesses have to compete on wages and conditions like everyone else. To hear the Bay Area Council tell it, that’s a catastrophe. From where I sit, it sounds like a functioning market.
I drove in the presidential motorcade for George H.W. Bush right after the 1992 Los Angeles riots. I saw what unchecked chaos looks like when the rule of law collapses. Sanctuary policies are the policy equivalent of that moment, deliberate erosion of order dressed up as compassion. My oldest son graduated from West Point. My youngest brother retired as a Green Beret. They did not put their lives on the line so American streets could become safe harbors for people who entered the country illegally.
The fix has been obvious since Trump’s first term: mandatory nationwide E-Verify, full 287(g) partnerships between ICE and local law enforcement, defunding of sanctuary jurisdictions, and interior enforcement that targets criminals first. End birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants through legislation or executive interpretation consistent with the 14th Amendment’s original meaning. Antonin Scalia would have had a field day with the current distortion of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
California’s experience is a cautionary tale. Net domestic out-migration worsened in 2024–2025 to a loss of 216,000 residents, the highest since 2018, while the state has shed a net 1.46 million domestic residents since 2020. Businesses and talent keep fleeing. Homelessness explodes despite billions spent. The state that once embodied aspiration now embodies fragility.
The Bay Area Council can keep publishing its cope reports. The rest of us understand the basic transaction: secure borders, enforced laws, and labor markets that reward American workers are not anti-immigrant. They are pro-American. The report’s authors are free to keep confusing the interests of employers with the interests of citizens. They’ve been doing that for decades. What’s changed is that the federal government is no longer helping them get away with it.
President Trump and Tom Homan are finally applying the only pressure that works, consequences. The elites can cry about “families” all they want. American families have waited decades for their government to put them first. It’s about damn time.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.