Business
A day without Mexicans in Mammoth? Locals mull how to get a message to Trump
MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. — If all the service workers born in Mexico stayed home from their jobs for just one day in this thriving resort town perched high in California’s Sierra Nevada, the humming tourist economy would probably faceplant harder than a first-time skier on an icy expert slope.
Most of the restaurants would have no staff, residents say. Hotels and Airbnbs would suffer the same fate. Construction projects across this posh skiing destination would come to a grinding halt.
“I think that would be like one of those zombie movies,” said Jose Diaz, 33, from Sinaloa, a supervisor at the Stove, a cozy breakfast spot in the heart of town.
Like so many others who have made their way here from small towns in Mexico, Diaz didn’t come for the skiing. He had heard through the grapevine that Mammoth was a good place to earn a steady paycheck.
Restaurant kitchens and hotel break rooms in Mammoth Lakes have been buzzing with the notion of Latino workers staging a one-day strike to demonstrate the town’s dependence on imported labor.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
That was 14 years ago. Now, Diaz and his wife — she’s from Guadalajara, and they met working at a Mammoth restaurant — are both here legally, he said. They have two kids born in the U.S. and recently bought a condo in town.
But, like almost everyone else in this alpine community of about 7,000 people, they have friends and family who would be vulnerable if President-elect Donald Trump’s pronouncements about deporting millions of undocumented immigrants actually come to pass.
Locals are torn about how exactly to respond. Some workers say they are counting on Trump, given his business background, to take a softer stance when it comes to resort towns such as Mammoth and South Lake Tahoe, whose economies would be devastated by mass deportations.
Others urge something more proactive: Restaurant kitchens, hotel break rooms and group chats have been buzzing with the notion of Latino workers staging a one-day strike to demonstrate the town’s dependence on imported labor.
Mayor Chris Bubser said she sympathizes with the growing anxiety around deportations, but hopes the strike doesn’t materialize.
Mammoth Lakes residents say their resort town would be devastated if the undocumented workers who provide much of the labor were swept up in mass deportations.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
“I feel badly for the business owners, because they’re not the ones making these awful threats and they’d be left in the lurch,” Bubser said.
As state and local officials across California grapple with the potential consequences of Trump’s proposed deportations, the natural focus is on farm communities in the Central Valley, where roughly half the people working in the fields and orchards are believed to be undocumented.
But pricier ZIP Codes are vulnerable, too, and it’s hard to imagine anywhere in the state that would suffer more than Mammoth Lakes if a substantial percentage of its undocumented workforce suddenly disappeared.
That’s because almost all of the tourists who flock to this internationally renowned resort are white-collar professionals. And the people who own property are, by and large, real estate investors, skiers with enough money to afford a second home or well-to-do retirees who headed for the hills to escape the congestion of coastal cities. None of them are likely to respond to help-wanted ads for line cooks and snowplow drivers.
So, immigrants end up doing most of the labor.
A worker moves lumber at a condominium construction site in Mammoth Lakes.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
About a third of Mammoth’s population is Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and more than half the students in the local public school system are from Spanish-speaking homes.
Many of the Latinos in town are citizens or green card holders, some from families who have lived here for generations. But residents guess at least half are in the country illegally. They’re not hard to find.
On a recent chilly afternoon, about a half dozen men were clearing snow from a commercial office building in town. The roofing company owner asked to be identified only as Julio, because he is undocumented. He said he has been doing construction work in the U.S. since 1989, most of that time in Mammoth Lakes.
His company has 15 employees, he said. He also has three kids, all U.S. citizens; his oldest is an officer for the California Highway Patrol.
He has doubts about the benefits of a one-day strike by Latino workers: “The purpose of doing it is to show that Hispanic labor is necessary, but I’m pretty sure everyone already knows that,” he said with a shrug.
Roofing contractor Julio at a Mammoth Lakes job site last week.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
He mentioned the record snowfall in the winter of 2022-23, when homeowners were desperate to get snow off their roofs before their houses collapsed.
“I didn’t see a whole lot of Americans, you know, white guys, up on those roofs,” Julio said.
He’s not worrying much about the talk of deportations, he said, in part because he sees no point in stressing about something he can’t control. But he also said he thinks Trump is a rational businessman who must know how much undocumented laborers add to the economy.
And Trump is in construction, Julio joked, so, “I’m pretty sure he’s got some undocumented people working for him, too.”
In fact, while Julio was put off by the sweeping, derogatory comments Trump made about Mexicans during the campaign, he thinks Trump is “a pretty good president.” He’s right about deporting people who come across the border illegally “looking for free stuff,” Julio said.
“I’ve been working my ass off,” Julio said. “I pay all my medical bills out of my pocket, my dentist, my vision. I didn’t get any low-income housing, because I don’t think I need it.”
He hopes Trump will spare hard workers, like him, who “make the country stronger,” he said. But he’s fine with deporting lazy people.
A kitchen worker at a popular Mammoth Lakes restaurant takes a short break for breakfast.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
“Whoever doesn’t benefit the country, kick them out of here,” he said.
For others, the shocking breadth of Trump’s threat to deport up to 11 million undocumented U.S. residents is terrifying. It’s hard for them to imagine how a dragnet of that size could pause to consider the merits of individual cases.
A secretary in the Mammoth school system, who asked only to be identified as Maria, is one of the people who is worried.
She said she came from Mexico with her mother when she was a kid and has since been granted U.S. citizenship. But her husband, who has worked in construction in Mammoth for more than 20 years, is undocumented.
He got caught coming across the border illegally when he was 14, and has not been able to “adjust his status,” she said.
Maria and her husband have three kids, all born in the U.S. One is about to join the military, she said. But the kids follow the news and hear the gossip at school, and their anxiety is building.
“My 10-year-old is terrified with the new president saying he’s going to deport everyone,” Maria said.
In addition to working in construction, her husband has worked as a bus driver for the school district and recently started his own snow removal business. He has an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITN, a document issued by the Internal Revenue Service to foreign nationals — including undocumented immigrants — so that they can pay taxes like everybody else.
“He is a responsible guy, a hard-working guy, with no ugly background at all,” Maria said.
Mono County Sheriff Ingrid Braun worries that fear of federal immigration agents will prevent crime victims from reaching out to her for help.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
A few years ago, his kidneys failed. He was able to get dialysis and, eventually, a transplant, thanks to the health insurance Maria gets through her job at the school district. But he now depends on very specific medication to stay alive, Maria said.
If he gets deported and has to return to the village they’re from in Michoacan, Maria worries that he’ll lose access to the lifesaving pills.
“People in Mexico die from things like that,” she said.
Like many law enforcement officers in California, Mono County Sheriff Ingrid Braun said she won’t help round up undocumented residents for deportation. But she worries that fear of federal immigration agents will prevent people from reaching out to her for help when they’ve been robbed, assaulted by a romantic partner or otherwise victimized.
“They’re not going to call if they’re afraid he’s going to get deported, or that they’ll be separated from their kids,” Braun said.
For the moment, Braun said, she’s skeptical the roundups will actually materialize. “I don’t think they have a plan. I think it was all a bunch of talk,” she said.
Though she can’t do anything to stop federal agents if they show up, she said, news travels fast in a small town and she thinks outsiders who don’t know the lay of the land would struggle to catch locals who would almost certainly know they were coming.
Mammoth High School students walk home after school in Mammoth Lakes.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
She also thinks the disruption to the economy would be so severe that immigration officials would get little cooperation from others in town. One way or another, most everyone here depends on the immigrants.
“People think resort towns like Mammoth are just full of rich people playing,” Braun said. But it’s immigrants who do all the work and keep the “industry humming.”
The U.S. Space Force announced Friday it has awarded satellite contracts with a combined value of about $1.6 billion to Rocket Lab in Long Beach and to the Redondo Beach Space Park campus of Northrop Grumman.
The contracts by the Space Development Agency will fund the construction by each company of 18 satellites for a network in development that will provide warning of advanced threats such as hypersonic missiles.
Northrop Grumman has been awarded contracts for prior phases of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, a planned network of missile defense and communications satellites in low Earth orbit.
The contract announced Friday is valued at $764 million, and the company is now set to deliver a total of 150 satellites for the network.
The $805-million contract awarded to Rocket Lab is its largest to date. It had previously been awarded a $515 million contract to deliver 18 communications satellites for the network.
Founded in 2006 in New Zealand, the company builds satellites and provides small-satellite launch services for commercial and government customers with its Electron rocket. It moved to Long Beach in 2020 from Huntington Beach and is developing a larger rocket.
“This is more than just a contract. It’s a resounding affirmation of our evolution from simply a trusted launch provider to a leading vertically integrated space prime contractor,” said Rocket Labs founder and chief executive Peter Beck in online remarks.
The company said it could eventually earn up to $1 billion due to the contract by supplying components to other builders of the satellite network.
Also awarded contracts announced Friday were a Lockheed Martin group in Sunnyvalle, Calif., and L3Harris Technologies of Fort Wayne, Ind. Those contracts for 36 satellites were valued at nearly $2 billion.
Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo, acting director of the Space Development Agency, said the contracts awarded “will achieve near-continuous global coverage for missile warning and tracking” in addition to other capabilities.
Northrop Grumman said the missiles are being built to respond to the rise of hypersonic missiles, which maneuver in flight and require infrared tracking and speedy data transmission to protect U.S. troops.
Beck said that the contracts reflects Rocket Labs growth into an “industry disruptor” and growing space prime contractor.
Business
California-based company recalls thousands of cases of salad dressing over ‘foreign objects’
A California food manufacturer is recalling thousands of cases of salad dressing distributed to major retailers over potential contamination from “foreign objects.”
The company, Irvine-based Ventura Foods, recalled 3,556 cases of the dressing that could be contaminated by “black plastic planting material” in the granulated onion used, according to an alert issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Ventura Foods voluntarily initiated the recall of the product, which was sold at Costco, Publix and several other retailers across 27 states, according to the FDA.
None of the 42 locations where the product was sold were in California.
Ventura Foods said it issued the recall after one of its ingredient suppliers recalled a batch of onion granules that the company had used n some of its dressings.
“Upon receiving notice of the supplier’s recall, we acted with urgency to remove all potentially impacted product from the marketplace. This includes urging our customers, their distributors and retailers to review their inventory, segregate and stop the further sale and distribution of any products subject to the recall,” said company spokesperson Eniko Bolivar-Murphy in an emailed statement. “The safety of our products is and will always be our top priority.”
The FDA issued its initial recall alert in early November. Costco also alerted customers at that time, noting that customers could return the products to stores for a full refund. The affected products had sell-by dates between Oct. 17 and Nov. 9.
The company recalled the following types of salad dressing:
- Creamy Poblano Avocado Ranch Dressing and Dip
- Ventura Caesar Dressing
- Pepper Mill Regal Caesar Dressing
- Pepper Mill Creamy Caesar Dressing
- Caesar Dressing served at Costco Service Deli
- Caesar Dressing served at Costco Food Court
- Hidden Valley, Buttermilk Ranch
A Stanford software engineering degree used to be a golden ticket. Artificial intelligence has devalued it to bronze, recent graduates say.
The elite students are shocked by the lack of job offers as they finish studies at what is often ranked as the top university in America.
When they were freshmen, ChatGPT hadn’t yet been released upon the world. Today, AI can code better than most humans.
Top tech companies just don’t need as many fresh graduates.
“Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs” with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. “I think that’s crazy.”
While the rapidly advancing coding capabilities of generative AI have made experienced engineers more productive, they have also hobbled the job prospects of early-career software engineers.
Stanford students describe a suddenly skewed job market, where just a small slice of graduates — those considered “cracked engineers” who already have thick resumes building products and doing research — are getting the few good jobs, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps.
“There’s definitely a very dreary mood on campus,” said a recent computer science graduate who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. “People [who are] job hunting are very stressed out, and it’s very hard for them to actually secure jobs.”
The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees.
Eylul Akgul graduated last year with a degree in computer science from Loyola Marymount University. She wasn’t getting offers, so she went home to Turkey and got some experience at a startup. In May, she returned to the U.S., and still, she was “ghosted” by hundreds of employers.
“The industry for programmers is getting very oversaturated,” Akgul said.
The engineers’ most significant competitor is getting stronger by the day. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, it could only code for 30 seconds at a time. Today’s AI agents can code for hours, and do basic programming faster with fewer mistakes.
Data suggests that even though AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring many people, it is not offsetting the decline in hiring elsewhere. Employment for specific groups, such as early-career software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has declined by nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022, according to a Stanford study.
It wasn’t just software engineers, but also customer service and accounting jobs that were highly exposed to competition from AI. The Stanford study estimated that entry-level hiring for AI-exposed jobs declined 13% relative to less-exposed jobs such as nursing.
In the Los Angeles region, another study estimated that close to 200,000 jobs are exposed. Around 40% of tasks done by call center workers, editors and personal finance experts could be automated and done by AI, according to an AI Exposure Index curated by resume builder MyPerfectResume.
Many tech startups and titans have not been shy about broadcasting that they are cutting back on hiring plans as AI allows them to do more programming with fewer people.
Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said that 70% to 90% of the code for some products at his company is written by his company’s AI, called Claude. In May, he predicted that AI’s capabilities will increase until close to 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs might be wiped out in five years.
A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need “two skilled engineers and one of these LLM-based agents,” which can be just as productive, said Nenad Medvidović, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California.
“We don’t need the junior developers anymore,” said Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, a Palo Alto-based AI startup. “The AI now can code better than the average junior developer that comes out of the best schools out there.”
To be sure, AI is still a long way from causing the extinction of software engineers. As AI handles structured, repetitive tasks, human engineers’ jobs are shifting toward oversight.
Today’s AIs are powerful but “jagged,” meaning they can excel at certain math problems yet still fail basic logic tests and aren’t consistent. One study found that AI tools made experienced developers 19% slower at work, as they spent more time reviewing code and fixing errors.
Students should focus on learning how to manage and check the work of AI as well as getting experience working with it, said John David N. Dionisio, a computer science professor at LMU.
Stanford students say they are arriving at the job market and finding a split in the road; capable AI engineers can find jobs, but basic, old-school computer science jobs are disappearing.
As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn’t have considered before. Some are creating their own startups. A large group of frustrated grads are deciding to continue their studies to beef up their resumes and add more skills needed to compete with AI.
“If you look at the enrollment numbers in the past two years, they’ve skyrocketed for people wanting to do a fifth-year master’s,” the Stanford graduate said. “It’s a whole other year, a whole other cycle to do recruiting. I would say, half of my friends are still on campus doing their fifth-year master’s.”
After four months of searching, LMU graduate Akgul finally landed a technical lead job at a software consultancy in Los Angeles. At her new job, she uses AI coding tools, but she feels like she has to do the work of three developers.
Universities and students will have to rethink their curricula and majors to ensure that their four years of study prepare them for a world with AI.
“That’s been a dramatic reversal from three years ago, when all of my undergraduate mentees found great jobs at the companies around us,” Stanford’s Liphardt said. “That has changed.”
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