Pulse on Policy: Understanding Greater San Diego’s Immigrants at a Challenging Moment

Alan Berube, Senior Vice President

The first four months of the second Trump administration have brought about many radical changes to the execution of federal policy, not only compared to the previous presidential administration, but also relative to historical norms. Perhaps nowhere have these changes been more evident and concerning than in the conduct of U.S. immigration policy and enforcement. As Brookings’s Tara Watson notes, the totality of these efforts—constricting regular immigration pathways, boosting enforcement, ending humanitarian programs, and generally making life harder for immigrants who live here—is “seemingly aimed at reducing the number of immigrants in the U.S. overall, regardless of legal status or criminal history, and increasing fear and uncertainty among those who remain.”

The San Diego area is an immigrant gateway. Uniquely positioned at the nexus of the southern U.S. border and the Pacific Rim, San Diego’s businesses, institutions, culture, and communities have long relied on immigrant energy. As a consequence, the local application of administration policies and actions such as ICE raids of local businesses, revoking student visas at UCSD and SDSU, detaining tourists and immigrants seeking asylum for extended periods, suspending refugee resettlement, denying federal funding to sanctuary jurisdictions, and attempting to end birthright citizenship not only affect specific local populations, but also represent challenges to the region’s identity.

This analysis paints an overarching portrait of San Diego’s immigrant community, the social and economic factors that distinguish its members from local native-born and U.S.-wide immigrant populations, and how legal status may impact the region’s immigrants in the current moment.

Immigrants have long made up a large share of San Diego’s population. As of 2023, more than three-quarters of a million San Diego County residents were foreign-born, representing 23% of total population. That was well above the U.S. foreign-born population share that year, which stood at 14%. Indeed, the immigrant share of San Diego County’s population surpassed today’s U.S. level some 40 years ago.

While immigrants’ share of total U.S. population has risen fairly steadily over the past four decades, their share of San Diego County’s population has leveled off, and is only slightly higher today than in 2000. This reflects a slowing pace of new immigrant arrivals to the San Diego area, which in turn has yielded a local foreign-born population that has resided in the United States longer than their counterparts elsewhere. As of 2023, fully one-third of San Diego County immigrants had entered the U.S. prior to 1990, compared to one-quarter of all U.S. immigrants.

On immigrant presence, San Diego ranks in the middle of the pack among large California counties. Immigrants make up a smaller share of population in San Diego County than in large Los Angeles-area and Bay Area counties, and a slightly larger share of population than in large Inland California counties.

Individuals from Mexico and Southeast Asia together represent more than half of San Diego’s immigrants. San Diego’s border-community status is evident in the large share of its immigrant residents who were born in Mexico—40% as of 2023 (about 300,000 individuals), compared to 23% nationwide. Mexican migrants have long made up a plurality of the region’s foreign-born individuals, representing 37% of the total in 1980.

The second-most common region of origin for Greater San Diego’s immigrants is Southeast Asia, which accounts for 20% of the total (versus 9% nationwide). Most of these individuals (91,000 in 2023) were born in the Philippines, and about half as many are from Vietnam (44,000). The region’s Filipino/a population increased rapidly after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act liberalized admissions from Asia and Latin America, driven in part by the significant shared presence of the U.S. Navy in the Philippines and San Diego. Similarly, because Camp Pendelton in North San Diego County was one of the major processing centers for tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, the region remains home to many of those families today.

Other regional origin groups tend to make up smaller shares of Greater San Diego’s immigrant community than elsewhere in the United States. In particular, Central American-born individuals represent only 3% of immigrants in the region, versus 9% nationwide, and 17% in Los Angeles County. People from other Latin American and Caribbean countries—for example, Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Colombia—also represent a much smaller proportion of local immigrants (4%) than U.S. immigrants overall (19%).

More than half of San Diego’s foreign-born residents are in their prime working years. Like other regions, San Diego draws people from abroad who seek economic opportunity. Most of those people, naturally, are of working age, and either have a job waiting for them when they arrive, or soon find one. Overall, 52% of foreign-born individuals in Greater San Diego are in their “prime” working years—age 25 to 54—versus 39% of the region’s U.S.-born residents.

Conversely, only 4% of San Diego-area immigrants are children (age 17 and under), compared to 26% of local native-born residents. Many recent adult migrants come to the United States alone, and send earnings back to their home countries to support their families. Moreover, with such a large share of the San Diego region’s immigrants arriving two to three decades ago, many who came to the U.S. as children have now aged into adulthood.

That noted, many U.S.-born San Diego children have immigrant parents. While there are about 31,000 foreign-born children in San Diego County as of 2023, there are roughly 150,000 “first-generation” kids who live with two immigrant parents, or with a single parent who is an immigrant.

The share of all foreign-born adults in Greater San Diego who were employed in 2023 (61%) mirrored that for their local U.S.-born counterparts (60%). Given their high employment rate and large working-age population share, immigrants constitute 27% of all workers in San Diego County. And while a large share possess relatively low levels of formal education—26% of foreign-born adults lack a high school diploma, against only 7% of native-born adults—fully 35% possess a bachelor’s or graduate degree, nearly the same proportion as among all U.S. adults, albeit lower than the 47% figure for native-born San Diegans.

The size and characteristics of the unauthorized immigrant population in Greater San Diego are harder to pinpoint. Because the Trump administration’s major stated immigration policy priority is the mass deportation of so-called illegal immigrants, local government, business, and nonprofit leaders would benefit from understanding who may be affected by expanded enforcement actions. Unauthorized immigrants—that is, noncitizens who entered the United States without permission, overstayed their period of lawful admission, or otherwise violated the terms of their admission—are almost by definition difficult to enumerate and profile.

Nevertheless, experts at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and in academia have developed trusted methods for estimating the size and characteristics of unauthorized immigrants in the United States. Their latest estimates suggest that the unauthorized population in 2023 reached 13.7 million, up 3 million from its level in 2019. While historically Mexicans accounted for the majority of unauthorized immigrants, they represented only 40% of the estimated total in 2023, as rising numbers of Central and South American migrants entered the United States in the early 2020s and added to the unauthorized total.

Importantly, many immigrants among the 13.7 million currently possess some type of temporary legal authorization that offers them relief from deportation and allows them to work. These include, for instance, immigrants who have awaiting a decision on their asylum application; those who hold Temporary Protected Status (TPS); Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) holders (aka “Dreamers”); and immigrants from countries such as Ukraine, Haiti, and Afghanistan who were granted special humanitarian parole. MPI estimates that up to 4 million of the 13.7 million unauthorized may possess some type of “twilight” status. The Trump administration, however, is currently attempting to revoke many of these statuses, thereby making those individuals (many of whom have been in the United States for years) eligible for deportation.

MPI last produced local profiles of unauthorized immigrants using 2019 data. In that year, they estimated that 169,000 unauthorized lived in San Diego County, representing about a quarter of the total foreign-born population counted in census survey data. If the size of the local unauthorized immigrant population increased at the same rate as the national total from 2019 to 2023, that would suggest approximately 210,000 unauthorized living in the county as of 2023. However, the main countries of origin fueling the rise in the national unauthorized total—Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, and Colombia—increased only minimally in San Diego’s census data over this period, and the county’s total foreign-born population was table. Therefore, the size and characteristics of the local unauthorized population likely resemble those from 2019. We do know from DHS statistics that roughly 8,400 DACA holders live in San Diego County, but we lack reliable information on the location of other unauthorized immigrants who possess a twilight status of some kind.

In that regard, several dimensions in which San Diego’s unauthorized immigrants differ from their counterparts nationally deserve note. They are more likely to have been in the United States for two or more decades; are equally male and female; are more likely to be enrolled in school as young adults; are more likely to be employed in two key local sectors, hospitality and professional services; and are more likely to have health insurance but less likely to own their own home, given the high local costs of housing.

Greater San Diego has a lot at stake in the design and execution of U.S. immigration policy. As a significant immigrant gateway, border community, and global capital of science and higher education, the San Diego region will remain a bellwether for other U.S. communities attempting to navigate a challenging new policy environment. Local institutions that may have previously focused on meeting the basic needs of new arrivals, or enabling immigrants’ social and economic integration, or facilitating companies’ and universities’ access to global talent, or guiding immigrants along pathways to long-term residency and citizenship, now grapple with how to protect their organizations and the people they serve.

San Diego’s immigrant community faces distinct challenges in the current environment given its makeup. Its members tend to have resided in the United States for longer than most, such that mass deportation efforts may cause greater disruption to established families and communities here than elsewhere. A significant share of the region’s native-born children live with at least one immigrant parent, raising the specter of family separation, deportation of U.S. citizens, and—should the Trump administration prevail in court—young San Diegans being stripped of their citizenship. And immigrants, both legal and unauthorized, constitute a particularly large share of the local workforce in key sectors such as hospitality.

In response to new challenges, some local community organizations have mobilized to protect the interests and rights of vulnerable immigrants. They are monitoring federal law enforcement activities in immigrant neighborhoods, holding clinics to inform residents about their legal rights when dealing with immigration authorities, and joining lawsuits to bar immigration enforcement in houses of worship. Local governments, for their part, have sued (and won a preliminary injunction) to stop the administration from withholding funds from sanctuary jurisdictions, and continue to fund immigrant legal services (though a recent push to expand the reach of that program failed). Local universities have succeeded in reversing the Trump administration’s revocation of some international student visas.

The situation remains dynamic, with dozens of administration actions and policies on immigration facing challenges in courts and in Congress. Moreover, San Diego-area leaders must navigate these uncertainties while also responding to federal assaults on free trade, scientific research, support for low-income families, and disaster relief. Even so, the region’s public, private, and civic-sector officials will do well to remind local residents and Washington decisionmakers that when it comes to immigration policy, Greater San Diego’s prosperity and identity lie in the balance.