San Diego\u2019s 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\u2019s also notable that these new population estimates reflect only the first six months of President Donald Trump\u2019s second term in office<\/a> when he started making good on his promise to aggressively secure the border and send\u00a0hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants back to their home countries.<\/p>\n On his first day in office, Trump signed a series of executive orders<\/a> focusing on the border, including eliminating<\/a> 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<\/a> of the U.S.-Mexico border fence and deployed troops<\/a> to reinforce border barriers.<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t 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<\/a> 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\u2019s term.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In California, the large drops in immigration were equally, if not more, remarkable. Each of the state\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n While a modest population loss of 5,000 people in a year isn\u2019t especially consequential for a county the size of San Diego, a continuing decline in immigration could have serious ramifications for the county\u2019s economy.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It is, in effect, a demographic perfect storm in San Diego as all three growth engines \u2014 birth rates, domestic migration and immigration \u2014 weaken simultaneously.<\/p>\n \u201cAll these forces are largely invisible to the public because the population over time has been pretty stable,\u201d said long-time demographer Dowell Myers, professor emeritus in public policy at USC. \u201cBut beneath the surface, your population has been propped up by immigration for years, and if you pull out the prop, watch what happens. You\u2019ll have problems finding workers for anything \u2014 restaurants, day care, finding a gardener, hospital workers.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd if that flow of immigrants is cut off permanently, San Diego\u2019s in big trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n San Diego economist Daniel Enemark echoes Myers\u2019 concerns, pointing out that when the population and labor force contract, so, too, does the economy.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s decidedly bad news,\u201d Enemark, chief economist of the San Diego Regional Policy and Innovation Center, said of the downturn in foreign-born arrivals. \u201cThe 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.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Pedro R\u00edos, 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 \u201cdomino effect\u201d 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.<\/p>\n It has hurt Judah Strausberg\u2019s 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\u2019s anti-immigration measures.<\/p>\n \u201cForeign 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,\u201d said Strausberg, who immigrated from France in 2008 and is now a partner in Peak Builders & Roofers. \u201cBut 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.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause 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\u2019re high quality, and we\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n For much of the past 15 years, San Diego County\u2019s 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\u2019s population has returned to what it was in 2016.<\/p>\n \u201cIf San Diego was growing at a really rapid rate, we might think that is a good thing,\u201d noted Myers. \u201cBut it\u2019s growing at a stagnant rate, so I think slowing down is not a good thing at all, not for anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n Some population loss, though, may not necessarily be an inherently bad thing, suggests Eric McGhee, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.<\/p>\n \u201cSan Diego County is not Detroit in the 1970s,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not losing population because its economy is collapsing. It\u2019s 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\u2019s been growing a lot in recent years.\u201d<\/p>\n In the Census Bureau\u2019s 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\u00a0repatriations and Department of Homeland Security removals. The bureau also sourced data from surveys conducted by Mexico.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n While the number of removals within ICE\u2019s 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<\/a> ICE\u2019s website.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s policies.<\/p>\n \u201cAggressive immigration enforcement has played a role in some families\u2019 decisions to leave, so I think that that part is true,\u201d he said. \u201cBut again, there are other reasons why San Diego\u2019s population may have declined and why other border cities\u2019 populations may have declined.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cYes, a lot of the Trump policies are keeping the population from growing, but you still have some growth in foreign migration,\u201d Major said. \u201cThe 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s good we have people coming in to take the low-paying jobs, but you\u2019re losing a lot of the higher-paying jobs and they pay the majority of the taxes.\u201d<\/p>\n Demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution and Beth Jarosz, senior fellow with Georgetown University, contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For much of the last decade, a steady, often robust flow of immigrants into the county has been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[14,23,100,74,76,75,1696],"class_list":{"0":"post-242119","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-immigration","9":"tag-local-news","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-san-diego","12":"tag-san-diego-headlines","13":"tag-san-diego-news","14":"tag-top-stories-sdut"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Concertina](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/sut-l-census-immig-002.jpg\")
Concertina wire at Whiskey 8, an area at the U.S.-Mexico border where migrants used to cross and turn themselves in to claim asylum, in San Ysidro. (Kristian Carreon \/ The San Diego Union-Tribune)<\/p>\n