Commentary: Oregon’s elite cannot ignore the cost of attacking immigrant workers

Published 10:11 am Monday, December 29, 2025

Earlier this month, Oregon’s most powerful corporate and political leaders gathered in Portland for the Oregon Business Plan Leadership Summit. The agenda was packed with speeches from CEOs, economists, and policymakers, outlining what sponsors such as Amazon and Google believe Oregon’s future economy should look like.

What was missing was impossible to ignore.

There was no discussion of the most significant destabilizing force facing Oregon’s workforce today: the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration raids and enforcement actions that are ripping families apart, emptying workplaces, and injecting fear into entire sectors of our economy. For a summit that claims to care about Oregon’s economic future, that silence was deeply disappointing.

Immigrant workers are the backbone of Oregon’s most important industries. Agriculture, construction, technology, food processing, hospitality, caregiving and logistics depend on immigrant labor. Many of these are physically demanding, low-paid and often dangerous. They are also jobs that keep Oregon running. Immigrants came here following the American dream, working to build better lives for our families and contributing to the wealth of this country and this state.

You cannot discuss Oregon’s economy without acknowledging the importance of immigrant workers. In 2025, more than 1,900 immigrant Oregonians — and people who Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers claim “look like immigrants” — have been detained, often without warrants or due process. Workers have been grabbed on their way to jobs in places like Woodburn and the surrounding agricultural communities. ICE and Border Patrol presence has surged in towns, workplaces, and neighborhoods, terrorizing kids at school, destabilizing local businesses and forcing families to consider leaving Oregon altogether.

This is not just a moral crisis. It is an economic one.

Immigrants in Oregon paid more than $5.6 billion in taxes in 2023. Undocumented immigrants contributed nearly $700 million. Many live in mixed-status households that include U.S. citizens and people with legal work authorization.

When immigrant families are pushed out, entire communities lose workers, customers, and taxpayers. Schools lose students. Employers lose experienced labor. As the Capital Chronicle has reported, in many communities, small business owners are reporting that sales have plummeted as people — no matter their immigration status — stay locked up at home, fearful that they will face ICE violence. Business owners are receiving threats from people empowered by the anti-immigrant hate speech coming from the Trump administration.

The Summit’s failure to confront these facts sends a clear message: Oregon’s corporate elite are willing to benefit from immigrant labor while remaining silent as those same workers are targeted, criminalized, and driven into fear. That contradiction cannot stand.

The wealthy and comfortable can ignore us only so long. PCUN is leading Oregonians in Days Without an Immigrant. The monthly actions, scheduled to occur once a month through May, will encourage participants to refrain from work, shopping and other economic activity.

Our goal is to get ICE out of our communities by building solidarity among allies and immigrant workers. We need other sectors to stand up against Gestapo immigration enforcement and find real solutions to our broken immigration system.

The broader goal is to push ICE out of Oregon by building solidarity across sectors. This moment demands that business leaders, elected officials, labor unions, faith leaders, small businesses, educators, and civic leaders stand with immigrant workers and reject abusive immigration enforcement practices that treat entire communities as threats. Silence is no longer neutral. It is complicity.

Oregon has long touted itself as a welcoming state. That reputation is now being tested. Business leaders cannot claim to care about workforce shortages, economic growth, or community stability while ignoring the deliberate targeting of the very workers who make those things possible.

The Day Without an Immigrant is a warning and an invitation. It warns that Oregon’s economy cannot survive on fear and exclusion. And it invites all Oregonians to stand up for a future rooted in dignity, safety, and shared prosperity.

Reyna Lopez is the president and executive director of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste. PCUN empowers farmworkers and working Latinx families in Oregon by building community, increasing representation in elections, and advocating for policy change at the national and state levels. This was first published in Oregon Capital Chronicle.