Governor Newsom proclaims Immigrant Heritage Month 2025

PROCLAMATION

California proudly celebrates Immigrant Heritage Month, recognizing and embracing our immigrant communities that boldly strengthen and fuel our state. We are honored by and better for the people who have chosen to pursue the California Dream.

As the world’s fourth-largest economy, California recognizes the vital contributions immigrants and their families make to sustaining a healthy and growing economy. We also know that their contributions span every imaginable facet of life in this state. From education to innovation, public safety to health, and everything in between, California would not be the rich hub of culture and economic activity it is today without the influence of ideas, heritage, and history from around the world.

Right now, immigrants and their families are being subjected to indiscriminate immigration enforcement, including those who have been here for decades, who have paid taxes, created families, and built homes here. We have seen a rising wave of hateful and dehumanizing rhetoric across the nation, based on falsehoods and fearmongering, that is designed to divide us and turn us against each other. California will not acquiesce to this backslide into the darkest parts of this country’s history.

Hurtful bigotry damages all of us. Today, over 11 million immigrants call this state home, and almost half of all Californian children have at least one immigrant parent. Immigrants comprise one-third of the state’s workforce and account for 40.3% of entrepreneurs. Immigrant households contributed $61.8 billion in state and local taxes in 2023. In 2022, immigrants founded over half of America’s startup companies valued at $1 billion, with 48% of these companies established in Silicon Valley.

Immigrant communities are inextricably and beautifully woven into California’s past, present, and future. This month, we celebrate all that immigrants are and all that they bring to this country. We hold fast to supporting our immigrant communities, including by promoting economic well-being and immigrant talent that support shared prosperity across California. We continue to call for Congressional action to create a meaningful pathway to citizenship for those who have been here for years, paying their taxes, being good members of our communities, to meet the needs of California’s immigrant families and industry, from the Central Valley to Silicon Valley.

Immigrant Heritage Month is a time for all of us to celebrate the ways our state and nation are enriched by people from all different backgrounds and recommit to ensuring the promise of opportunity for all to thrive continues for generations to come.

NOW THEREFORE I, GAVIN NEWSOM, Governor of the State of California, do hereby proclaim June 2025 as “Immigrant Heritage Month.”

IN WITNESS WHEREOF I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Great Seal of the State of California to be affixed this 8^th day of June 2025.

GAVIN NEWSOM
Governor of California

ATTEST:
SHIRLEY N. WEBER, Ph.D.
Secretary of State