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.

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)

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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.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s constant reminders that California’s economy ”leads the nation” as well as being a model for social justice are delusional. To be sure, California has a huge GDP, paced largely by high real estate prices and the stock value of a handful of tech companies, but it is not widely seen as a place for class mobility, and it is slowly ceding its dominance, even in tech-related industries.

In contemporary California, home to four of the world’s seven most valued tech firms, tech bros and real estate speculators occupy what Lenin called “the commanding heights,” while the reality on the ground is far less ethereal. The view from where most Californians reside is revealed in a new study sponsored by Chapman University: “Is California Losing Its Mojo?,” by business professors Marshall Toplansky (Chapman) and Kenneth Murphy (UC Irvine).

Historically, the report notes, California has outpaced the rest of the country in terms of the growth of its goods and services. However, that pace of GDP growth in the state has dropped significantly since 2022, with the measure now lagging when compared with other states. The distribution of jobs and wealth is even more worrisome.

California has been a particularly poor bet for blue-collar professions, such as manufacturing, the traditional path to upward mobility for minorities and non-college educated people. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, analyzed by Lightcast, shows California has lagged far behind places like Utah, Nevada, Texas and Arizona over a decade.

The Chapman paper acknowledges that the state has experienced enough job growth to keep unemployment levels low, but as the report details, most new jobs in California aren’t concentrated in high-wage sectors. Over the last 10 years, 62% of jobs added in California were in lower-than-average paying industries, versus 51.6% for the nation as a whole. In the last three years, the situation worsened, with 78.1% of all jobs added in California coming from lower-than-average paying industries, versus 61% for the nation as a whole.

In a state with high living costs, a dearth of well-paying jobs seems likely to bear responsibility for the state’s out-migration rate and its poverty rate, which the Census Bureau calculates, in its most comprehensive estimate, as 15.4%, one of the highest in the nation. California may be home to a lot of billionaires, but it also is home to nearly 30% of the country’s homeless.

Of course, not everyone has suffered. Besides tech billionaires, who is doing well in California? Older homeowners, for one, whose bottom line has risen as home values increased dramatically. Government workers have also thrived.

Census Bureau data highlighted in the Chapman report show that California public sector job growth over the last decade has been growing at about the same pace as jobs overall in California, but the average annual pay for those government jobs was almost double that of private sector jobs. In other words, the road to the middle class comes not from private employment but from jobs that are funded by taxpayers.

In the past, California cities including San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego all ranked in the top 10 among hubs for “advanced industry” employment — where there’s high investment in R&D and a high percentage of STEM roles. But since 2020, only San Jose remains in the top 25 metro areas for growth in such employment. Today the emerging hot spots are often east of the Sierra: Austin, Texas; Nashville; Indianapolis; Salt Lake City; and Phoenix.

Can California get its mojo back? After all, many of the state’s assets — research universities, leading tech firms and the lifestyle appeal — have not disappeared.

First, Newsom and other state cheerleaders have to stop using the size of the economy as a cover for real problems. Whatever the state’s strengths, as the Chapman report puts it, low-wage jobs overtaking advanced industry work is not sustainable.

The Biden administration emphasized bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., and President-elect Donald Trump promises to do the same, but California misses out on opportunities due to the costs associated with its regulatory regimes.

Consider technologies largely developed and embraced by California, such as EVs and the batteries that run them. Jobs in those manufacturing industries overwhelmingly fall to red states, largely a reflection of such things as easier permitting rules, lower energy costs and less intrusive labor regulations.

Remarkably, Newsom, who feuds with Elon Musk and has taken on the role of the national anti-Trump, has promised that if the next administration in Washington eliminates the federal $7,500 buyer EV tax credits, California will step in with state rebates for the vehicles — with reportedly one exception, Teslas, which happen to be the dominant American brand and the only EVs made in California. The plant in Fremont employs thousands in good manufacturing jobs.

And that’s hardly the end of the self-destructive politicking.

One “advanced industry” where California, and in particular Southern California, still has a leg up is aerospace, and its corollary, defense. The state remains well in the lead in terms of aerospace-related employment, and innovative new firms, such as Anduril in Orange County, seem primed to take advantage of Trump’s emphasis on military spending. In his first term, he increased the defense budget to historic highs.

But is California’s Democratic leadership on board?

Once again, the state’s relations with Musk, Trump “first buddy” and the world’s preeminent space pioneer, would indicate just the opposite. Musk, upset at a California law that allows schools to keep parents in the dark when their children identify as LGBTQ+, decided to move SpaceX’s headquarters from Hawthorne to Texas this year. And just weeks ago, the California Coastal Commission denied SpaceX’s request to increase its rocket launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base; reportedly after commissioners discussed his political views before they voted on the issue. Even Newsom objected.

This is not the way to build a truly inclusive and healthy economy. Gavin Newsom can talk all he wants about California’s bounty, but the road the state’s Democrats have set for us has been profoundly regressive.

Joel Kotkin is a contributing writer to Opinion, the presidential fellow for urban futures at Chapman University and senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas, Austin.

The ride-hailing company Lyft accused San Francisco of overcharging it $100 million in taxes over the last five years in a lawsuit filed last week.

Lyft, which is headquartered in the city, said in the complaint that the fees paid by riders to drivers are not part of the company’s revenue and should not be taxed. The company considers its drivers as customers, not employees, the company said.

“Lyft does not treat drivers as employees for any purpose,” the complaint said. “Lyft serves a broker/middleman role in the transaction between drivers and riders, and as such, its taxable gross receipts must be limited to the amounts charged to drivers for use of its marketplace services.”

Lyft makes the bulk of its money from the fees it charges drivers. It also brings in some revenue from other sources, including subscriptions and advertising.

“Lyft recognizes revenue from rideshare as being comprised of fees paid to Lyft by drivers, not charges paid by riders to drivers,” said the complaint, filed in San Francisco Superior Court.

San Francisco wrongly included driver income as part of Lyft’s revenue when calculating taxes between 2019 and 2023, Lyft said. The company is now seeking refunds for overpaid taxes as well as interest and penalties.

“Lyft doesn’t take operating in San Francisco for granted and we love serving both riders and drivers in our hometown city,” the company said in a statement. “We believe the city is incorrect with how it calculated our gross receipts tax. … We filed this lawsuit to help correct this issue.”

Lyft called San Francisco’s tax methodology “distortive” and is waiting for a formal response from the city.

“We will review the complaint and respond accordingly,” said Jen Kwart, a spokesperson for the San Francisco city attorney.

This isn’t the first time a business has disputed a high tax bill from San Francisco. Last year, Detroit-based automaker General Motors sued the city, seeking to recoup more than $100 million in back taxes, claiming the taxes were improperly calculated.

The Lyft lawsuit comes amid debate over how rideshare drivers should be classified and how gig economy companies such as Lyft and Uber should be taxed. Lyft’s complaint notes that neither the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission nor federal tax authorities consider driver compensation as part of company revenue.

Ride-hailing companies classify their drivers as independent contractors in the United States instead of employees, meaning the companies don’t have to provide workers certain benefits such as sick leave and overtime pay.

Unions fighting for better working conditions say drivers are improperly labeled but lost a legal battle this year in California over the issue. The California Supreme Court upheld a voter initiative known as Proposition 22 that allowed companies such as Lyft to classify their workers as contractors, a law ride-hailing services say is vital to their business model.

Lyft has also faced scrutiny from the federal government over allegations that it made false and misleading statements about how much its drivers would earn. In November, Lyft agreed to pay $2.1 million in civil penalties to resolve the accusations.