By Qamar Bashir
Imagine waking up to an America where every immigrant—documented or not—has vanished. In mere hours, fields lie barren, hospitals are crippled, software projects stall, and restaurants shutter. Markets nosedive, trucks stop moving, and cities fall eerily silent. This isn’t dystopian fantasy—it’s a projection grounded in data, real-life policy outcomes, and warnings from leaders like California Governor Gavin Newsom, who recently declared: “Without immigrants, California collapses—and America follows.”
California, the world’s fourth-largest economy with a GDP of $4.1 trillion, owes its strength to immigrants. From Silicon Valley coders to Central Valley farmworkers, from hospital nurses to hotel cleaners, immigrants form the invisible scaffolding of nearly every major industry. They don’t just fill gaps—they drive growth, productivity, and innovation. Their removal would not simply hurt America. It would break it.
Start with agriculture. Over 50% of farm laborers in the United States are immigrants, many of them undocumented. These men and women—often unseen—pick strawberries, milk cows, and harvest grains that keep America fed. Remove them, and crops rot in the fields. Dairy production stalls. Food prices spike. Shortages become the norm, not the exception. Rural America collapses first, followed swiftly by every grocery store in the nation.
Healthcare is next to shatter. Nearly 30% of doctors in the U.S. are immigrants. Add to that 23% of nursing assistants and 38% of home health aides. This isn’t an abstract number—it’s the emergency room doctor, the nursing home caregiver, the hospice nurse on a night shift. Their absence would render hospitals inoperable and elder care systems paralyzed. States already stretched thin on healthcare would face system-wide breakdowns within weeks.
In Silicon Valley, the effect would be equally catastrophic. Twenty-four percent of tech workers in the U.S. are immigrants. More than 55% of startups in America’s innovation epicenter are founded by immigrants or their children. They drive advancements in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, green energy, and medical research. Pull them out, and Silicon Valley becomes a desert of abandoned code and shelved inventions. The U.S. loses its technological supremacy overnight.
Wall Street too is built on global minds. One in four financial analysts and fintech engineers is foreign-born. Their departure triggers a domino effect: portfolio instability, retreating investors, and algorithmic panic in global markets. Without the quantitative analysts from China, India, and Eastern Europe, the heart of American finance skips a beat—and may never recover.
On construction sites, nearly a third of the workforce is made up of immigrants. They build homes, wire buildings, lay bricks, and pave roads. Their sudden removal would halt housing projects, delay critical infrastructure, and choke efforts to rebuild after disasters. The affordability crisis would deepen; entire cities would freeze in mid-construction.
The service industry wouldn’t fare better. Immigrants hold more than 40% of jobs in hotels, restaurants, laundries, garbage disposal, and transportation. They clean rooms, prepare food, drive taxis, operate buses, and sweep streets. Without them, urban centers grind to a halt. Tourism dies. City sanitation collapses. Public transport shrinks to a shadow of itself. The American city, in every major state, begins to decay from within.
In the realm of manufacturing and logistics, 15% of the labor force is immigrant. These individuals assemble electronics, produce steel, fabricate auto parts, and staff meatpacking plants. Pull this vital workforce and the U.S. supply chain falls apart—factories shut down, exports plummet, and global contracts are cancelled.
Perhaps most dangerously, America loses its creative spark. Nearly half of all PhD holders in STEM fields are foreign-born. Immigrants contribute to over 25% of U.S. patents each year. These are the minds building new vaccines, designing space systems, and securing digital infrastructure. When these innovators vanish, so does America’s future.
Then there’s the fiscal nightmare. Immigrants contribute over $330 billion in taxes annually—funding Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and public schools. Their departure would tear massive holes in state and federal budgets. Pensions would become unstable. Infrastructure funding would dry up. Many rural hospitals and schools—already on financial life support—would shutter permanently.
Economic modeling by UC Merced and the Bay Area Council estimates that removing undocumented immigrants alone would cost California up to $275 billion annually—roughly 9% of its state GDP. Scale that across the country, and the U.S. economy could shrink by over $1.5 trillion, with ripple effects triggering global recession.
Governor Gavin Newsom has made it clear: “Immigrants are the backbone of California’s economy… They are the reason California leads in technology, agriculture, and service.” He warned that recent immigration crackdowns threaten the entire ecosystem. “Under the Constitution, the Governor of California and all staff will protect immigrants by all means possible, without relent. And this will be done with the cooperation and goodwill of all inhabitants of California—whether immigrants or not.” His words echoed as Los Angeles reeled from ICE raids that left neighborhoods terrified, businesses unmanned, and families torn apart.
Without immigrants, America doesn’t just lose labor—it loses soul, structure, and strength. It stops being a destination of dreams and becomes a monument to fear. No economy, no matter how powerful, survives by cannibalizing the very people who build it.
Immigrants have cleaned America’s homes and innovated its tech. They’ve raised its children and revitalized its cities. They’ve laid its foundations—literally and figuratively. To drive them out isn’t just a political miscalculation; it’s economic suicide.
Immigration isn’t America’s burden—it’s America’s engine. And without that engine, the world’s most powerful nation will stall—and fall.
