Pro-migration media outlets and Twitter accounts are declaring their alarm at California’s empty stores and quiet streets amid President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts.
But the reports and videos exaggerate the benefits of illegal migration on the consumer economy, even as they also display how the government inflated Americans’ economy by importing millions of illegal migrants from developing nations into sanctuary cities.
“If there’s a street of bodegas or stores that often cater to illegal immigrants, and then the illegal immigrants are gone… that’s not in any way indicative of any kind of impact on the larger economy,” said Steve Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “You have to get to $300 billion [in business activity] to equal 1 percent” of the $30 trillion economy, he added.
“Lupe Lopez’s Latino market in Newark, California, has been a shopping and social hub for decades — until recently,” said an alarmed four-author article at the Washington Post:
Now the aisles are often quiet, the parking lot near empty, she said. Neighboring businesses are no different, she added: Restaurants, party and clothing stores, and even the big-box retailers seem to be emptier since the Trump administration ramped up its mass deportation campaign, raiding businesses across industries and targeting day workers in retail parking lots. “The fear is felt in every aspect — no one is doing a party, no one is going anywhere,” the 68-year-old [Lupe Lopez] said of her customers. “The shelves are just untouched.”
“Coca-Cola’s sales volume in North America fell 3% in the first quarter of the year, partly because of the pullback by Hispanic shoppers,” said a June 11 report in the Wall Street Journal, headlined “ICE Raids Have Sent Latino Shoppers Into Hiding and Big Brands Are Hurting.” The article continued:
Colgate-Palmolive, Modelo brewer Constellation Brands, and restaurant chains including Wingstop and El Pollo Loco over the past few months have told investors that a decrease in Hispanic spending is hurting their sales.
“We have seen a huge decline in traffic,” Régis Schultz, CEO of JD Sports, said on a call with analysts in May. The company owns retail chain Shoe Palace, which has stores in 12 states and targets Latino consumers. “You can see definitively the impact” of the immigration policy, he said.
But even when migrants stay off the streets, they are still spending money via rent and consumption — for example, with food orders at restaurants. “California, for example, reported flat same-store sales, despite leading the country in total restaurant volume,” one expert told a news site for the restaurant industry.
Pro-migration groups are eager to inflate the apparent economic damage. In 2023, illegals “held $299 billion in spending power,” said a 2025 report by the pro-migration American Immigration Council.
“But the $299 billion number is just one cent for every dollar in the nation’s economy,” Camarota noted, adding:
Illegal immigrants are somewhere around 4 percent of workers and less than 2 percent of the GDP… so let’s be clear that we’re talking maybe 1 percent of [the economy], maybe.
The second thing to keep in mind is that [the reports are] missing the benefit — the savings to taxpayers, the higher wages and greater employment opportunities for less educated, legal immigrants and U.S.-born… There’s no effort to consider the benefits [of deportations].
The costs of mass migration on citizens are huge — but they are often indirect and unrecognized by the establishment media.
Under the Extraction Migration policy pushed by President Joe Biden and his pro-migration deputies, 300 million blue-collar and white-collar Americans lost power and wealth in the labor and housing markets to investors and government bureaucrats.
Americans also lost workplace investment, productivity, and training once enabled by employers. Many college graduates lost career opportunities as Biden border czar Alejandro Mayorkas expanded the inflow of white-collar workers, such as H-1B visa workers.
Citizens also lost civic stability to government-imposed social diversity. and lost political power to the expanding blocs of ethnic voters who demand benefits for their particular communities, cultures, and home countries.
Camarota continued:
The third thing is, let’s imagine there is some businesses that exist primarily to cater to illegal immigrants. These businesses rise up and are created [but] is that a benefit to Americans? If a business exists because of illegal immigrants… it’s not at all clear that that was a good deal for Americans, especially when you consider the downside, the fiscal cost, the impact on American taxpayers.
Illegal immigration is not just an economic question. It has to do with restoring the rule of law, and if that had an economic price — which is not clear it does — we don’t normally say, ‘Well, criminal activity has a stimulating effect on the economy for some people, but that’s not any reason not to enforce the law.’
Under Biden’s migration policy, Americans also grew disgusted at their government’s migration policy as it spent billions of dollars to extract human resources from poor countries for use in the U.S. economy, regardless of the massive loss of life among migrants and Americans, or the huge damage to the sending countries.
That disgust helped elect Trump in November 2024.
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