Napa Valley runs on immigrants. Its wineries, restaurants, hotels and farms all do. What a new report makes plain is that more and more of those workers can no longer afford to live in the county where they work — and a growing share have left altogether.
The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington research group, released its report “Rooted in the Valley” on Thursday, May 7, at a Napa Valley Community Foundation event in Yountville. About 100 people showed up to hear it.
The numbers are stark.
- Immigrants make up 21% of Napa County residents, 29% of the workforce, and 71% of the people who tend its vineyards and farms.
- The share of immigrant workers who both live and work in Napa County has dropped 11% since the 2006-10 period.
- The share commuting in from outside the county — most from Solano, some from Sonoma — has risen 13%.
- Roughly 8,400 county residents are unauthorized, about 25% of all foreign-born people here. They make up 27% of all farm and vineyard workers.
Put plainly: the people who keep Napa’s signature industries running can no longer afford to put down roots here. They drive in from Vallejo, Fairfield and Santa Rosa, often more than an hour each way.
Valerie Lacarte, the senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute who led the study, says the local picture matters more than the national one.
“It’s at the local level that immigrant integration happens,” Lacarte says. “Once immigrants are here, it’s the communities at the state and especially at the local level that really learn about their own community needs.”
What’s at stake
The report runs the numbers on what Napa stands to lose if the trend keeps going. Immigrant workers in the wine and hospitality industry generate about $1.5 billion a year — roughly 11% of Napa County’s gross domestic product. Pull just unauthorized workers out of the labor force and the county loses $366 million, about 3% of GDP, plus an estimated $28 million a year in local tax revenue.
A bigger pullout — every immigrant worker out of wine and hospitality — would wipe out about 1,200 jobs, most of them in fruit farming. Many of those jobs are held by U.S.-born workers. When the people picking grapes leave, the bookkeeper, the tractor mechanic and the insurance agent feel it next.
The human side
Joe Carrillo, a retired Napa pediatrician who came to the Yountville event, says he sees the worry on the faces of children in mixed-status families — kids whose parents may be citizens, residents, undocumented or some mix of the three. He says he still feels Napa County provides a positive environment for Latino youth, but the anxiety in his old patient base is real.
Erika Lubensky, who runs Napa’s Community Resources for Children, says the report puts a number on what front-line workers have already been watching for years.
“It’s nice to have a quantifiable number,” Lubensky says. “The question is: What are we doing about it?”
The common-sense part
Wine-industry contraction is piling on top of the workforce squeeze. Gallo announced layoffs in February at its St. Helena Ranch Winery — 56 jobs there, 93 across five sites. Two independent vineyards, Ernest and Margins, have stopped making wine entirely. Stanly Ranch sold out of foreclosure for less than its loan.
So Napa is losing wine jobs and immigrant workers at the same time. Which is driving which is the question the Migration Policy Institute report does not fully answer. What the data does show is that the outmigration started long before the current federal immigration crackdown. Housing costs and a slowing wine market were already pushing people out by the time ICE began stepping up enforcement nationally.
The new federal pressure adds weight to a trend that is already 15 years in the making.
Three-quarters of Napa’s immigrants have lived in the United States for 20 years or longer. They have raised children here — nearly half of all Napa County students have at least one immigrant parent. They earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by U.S.-born workers, and they are more likely to work full-time and year-round.
The county’s answer to all of this, so far, has been the conversation in the Yountville Community Room on a Thursday afternoon in May. Roughly 100 people. One report. And a polite question from one of them that no one in the room could answer:
What are we doing about it?
Sources: Migration Policy Institute, “Rooted in the Valley: Immigrants in Napa County’s Communities and Economy,” released May 7, 2026; Napa Valley Register, May 8, 2026; The American Canyon Current, May 8, 2026; Napa Valley Community Foundation event recap; The Spokesman-Review reporting on Gallo, February 2026; The Independent reporting on Napa wine industry, April 2026.