'This City Was Built on Our Backs': Immigrant Voices on What LA's Diversity Really Cost

On a Thursday morning at the Mercado La Paloma on West 28th Street, a Oaxacan vendor named only as Doña Carmen — she declined to give her last name — has been selling tlayudas from the same stall for nineteen years. She arrived from San Marcos Tlapazola with $300, no English, and a cousin's phone number. Today she employs four people and sends money home every fortnight. "This city gave me something," she said, wiping down her counter. "But right now, it feels like it's deciding whether to take it back."

That ambivalence hangs over Los Angeles this summer with unusual weight. Federal immigration enforcement operations have intensified across Southern California since January, with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducting raids in the San Fernando Valley, East Los Angeles, and the garment district south of the Fashion District. Against that backdrop, community organizations say they are fielding a record volume of calls from residents afraid to leave their homes, send their children to school, or report crimes to the LAPD. The tension arrives just as the city is mobilizing a massive construction and service workforce for the 2028 Olympic Games infrastructure push — a workforce that, by most independent estimates, is heavily immigrant.

A City Built Neighborhood by Neighborhood

Los Angeles is home to roughly 3.5 million people within city limits, and the Migration Policy Institute estimated in 2024 that nearly 38 percent of the city's residents were born outside the United States — a higher share than New York City's 37 percent and far above Chicago's 21 percent. The county figure is higher still. That concentration of foreign-born residents isn't an accident of geography. It reflects a century of deliberate economic recruitment: the bracero agricultural programs of the 1940s and 1950s, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that opened the door to Asian immigration, and the refugee resettlement waves that followed the Vietnam War and the Central American civil conflicts of the 1980s.

Walk a two-mile stretch of Olympic Boulevard and you cross through Koreatown, which absorbed tens of thousands of Korean arrivals after 1975, then through the fringes of Pico-Union, where Salvadoran and Guatemalan families rebuilt their lives after fleeing U.S.-backed counterinsurgencies. The Thai Town section of East Hollywood — officially designated in 1999, the first such district in the country — sits a few miles north. Each enclave came with its own economic engine: garment factories, restaurants, swap meets, small manufacturing shops that fed the broader regional economy.

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, known as CHIRLA and headquartered on West 6th Street in Westlake, has run immigrant legal services in Los Angeles since 1986. Staff there say walk-in consultations have more than doubled since February, with many clients asking not about pathways to citizenship but about what happens to their children — many of them U.S.-born — if a parent is detained. The Los Angeles County Office of Immigrant Affairs, created in 2017, has expanded its Know Your Rights workshop schedule to six days a week at libraries and community centers across the county.

Fear Has a Cost the City Can Measure

Economists at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs released a brief in May 2026 estimating that immigrant-owned businesses account for roughly $232 billion in annual economic output in Los Angeles County. Construction trades — essential to Mayor Karen Bass's homeless shelter emergency program and the Olympic venue schedule — draw an estimated 53 percent of their workforce from immigrant labor pools, according to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation's 2025 workforce report.

Several community members at the Pilipino Workers Center on South Figueroa Street said they had skipped medical appointments and avoided the DMV in recent months. One woman, a home health aide from Cebu who has lived in Carson for eleven years, said she calculated the bus routes she could take that didn't pass near the ICE field office on Alameda Street in downtown.

For those navigating this moment, advocates at CHIRLA say the most practical immediate steps are signing up for Los Angeles County's Rapid Response Network, which alerts registered volunteers when enforcement operations are spotted in specific ZIP codes, and ensuring that U.S.-citizen children have certified copies of their birth certificates stored with a trusted adult. The network's hotline — 1-877-NOTRAID — logged more than 4,000 calls in June alone, a monthly record since the program launched in 2017.