The employers taking the largest hit are in the restaurant industry (700 jobs), retail (350 jobs), and residential and commercial property rental (345 jobs), and auto repair (100 jobs). This is where the science of input-output analysis meets the art of economic impact analysis. We don’t know exactly which specific firms will be impacted. But from my experiences on campus across the country, these are exactly the types of main street college town businesses that exist near campus and serve students of all types. 

My analysis quantified the impact of new international students’ non-tuition spending. The results? Hosting 21,587 fewer new international students (277,118 this year as opposed to last year’s 298,705) means 7,300 fewer jobs and $500 million in lost labor income. 

Further analysis reveals which occupations are most heavily impacted. Of the 7,300 jobs that are affected, 390 are retail sales worker jobs, 370 are food and beverage server jobs, 290 are home health aide jobs, 280 are health care diagnostics jobs, and 260 are material moving worker jobs. This only takes into account non-tuition spending. The effects of lost revenue will hit higher education institutions as well. 

What are the structural reasons that the economic footprint of new international students is so wide-ranging? As a whole, international students are high-spend consumers, shelling out significant sums on housing, food, transportation, healthcare, and retail. The dollars spent by international students cycle through local economies. For example, a landlord uses the student’s rent money to buy pizza, and the pizza shop owner uses the money the landlord spent on dinner to buy a new shipment of cardboard pizza boxes – and so on.

Collectively, this year’s 277,118 new international students’ spending supports 93,000 jobs and $12.6B in GDP. The would-be international students who faced visa application issues or got caught up in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown will spend their money elsewhere, whether it’s in their home countries or in other study-abroad destinations. 

This demand shock hitting local economies and service jobs may seem quiet now, but as the school year goes on, and the spending shortage ripples through local economies, the implications are grim for local consumer spending, small business revenues, commercial real estate around campuses, and even tax collections. College towns and metro areas with large university footprints will see the strongest effects, especially in states with historically heavy international enrollment, like California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois. 

Business leaders and government officials need to think about the myriad ripple effects of changes to international enrollment statistics in higher education. The broader linkages to both the local and national economy are underappreciated. Needless to say, fewer international students today can mean fewer skilled workers in sectors like tech, healthcare, and engineering tomorrow. What’s just as important, and maybe less apparent, is the immediate threat to jobs and GDP upstream of enrollment that a decline in new international students represents. 

New rules that make it harder for students to get visas and proposed caps on international students at some institutions present a threat to the U.S. economy at large and to small businesses in our communities – not just institutions of higher learning. We cannot ignore the  economic tradeoffs of national policy changes at the local level. Beyond the immediate economic impacts, my experience as a professor at campuses large and small have informed my view that international students enrich their communities in ways other than just the number of dollars they spend at local businesses. The perspectives they bring on both a personal and intellectual level are invaluable. They have spurred my thinking on topics from economics and development to the personal and profound. We are richer for their presence. 

International students are part of student spending in communities across the country and the number of new international students limits Americans’ ability to work and thrive, too. It is imperative that we not ignore or underestimate how this demand shock prompts a material headwind to growth in key regions.    

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

Mamdani won the general election with 50.4% of the vote, a larger share than was predicted by most polls, and his get-out-the-vote campaign has received some of the credit. Mamdani claims that his campaign had over 100,000 volunteers knocking on doors across New York City.

This focus on on-the-ground mobilization stands out given the increasing attention devoted to online campaigning over the past 15 years.

Particularly during that time period, online platforms have been a major focus of political campaigns and campaign research. Targeted advertising and new media strategies are increasingly viewed as central to campaign success. So is coverage of the campaign by legacy and social media more generally.

Moreover, solid empirical evidence of the effectiveness of door-to-door canvassing is limited. Recent work finds very few effects of in-person canvassing, except in very specific circumstances. One recent paper suggests that door-to-door canvassing by the candidate can make a difference to election outcomes. But in a race in New York City, it is not likely that Mamdani himself was able to reach enough voters to make a difference.

How much did Mamdani’s ground game contribute to his victory? As a political communication scholar, I know that assessing the impact of different methods used by political campaigns is difficult – in part because political campaigns include multiple lines of communication.

‘Hybrid’ campaigns

No campaign exists in isolation — nearly every candidate’s campaign occurs alongside opposing candidates’ campaigns. The effects of one campaign are often masked by the countering effects of the other.

The size of a campaign on one platform also tends to be correlated with the size of that candidate’s campaign on other platforms. When television advertising increases alongside social media advertising and door-to-door canvassing, identifying the effects of any single platform can be difficult.

Clever research designs are in some instances able to identify effects. These generally find that the impact of not just door-knocking but also ads and online advertising can be relatively limited.

In the modern technological environment, the impact of any single aspect of a campaign may be especially difficult to assess. Campaigning increasingly occurs in what researchers have called a “hybrid media” environment. Campaigns are waged in person, on the news and across multiple social media.

Each of these platforms comes with different advantages and disadvantages. Each also prioritizes different kinds of information.

Plainly stating your policy platform may work for coverage of a campaign stop on the evening news. But if you want that policy to go viral on TikTok, then you may need to add a dance – or an influencer.

Find volunteers online, send them knocking

Candidates have increasingly recognized the need to tailor messages for different communication platforms, such as television ads, Facebook posts and TikToks, building hybrid campaigns that attempt to spread a message across multiple, different spaces.

This interactivity across platforms has been especially evident in postelection assessments of the Mamdani campaign. His social media campaign was adept at producing the kinds of content that attract attention online. That campaign also appears to have been able to convert online engagement into real-world activism, including door-to-door canvassing.

There have been growing concerns among academics and campaign organizers about “slacktivism” — activism that amounts to one or two clicks online but nothing more. One worry is that a quick online endorsement may in some instances give people a sense that they have done their share and limit more active forms of engagement. The Mamdani campaign appears to have overcome this problem, at least in part.

But 100,000 people knocking on doors probably does not happen without the success of an online campaign. Finding and mobilizing campaigners was one important focus of Mamdani’s engagement online, after all.

Do it yourself − then repeat on socials

In-person campaigning by Mamdani, on the street and in the taxi line, is almost certainly made more effective through circulation on Instagram and TikTok.

Using mass media to broadcast campaign stops is not new, of course.

The construction of campaign stops that produce good social media content is becoming more common, however. The ways in which campaigns unfold in person are increasingly intertwined with the way they unfold online.

In this way, the Mamdani campaign may have been a textbook example of a modern hybrid campaign and an illustration of the coevolution of digital and on-the-ground campaigning.

To be clear, the success of the Mamdani campaign is probably not about his online presence or his ground game, but both at the same time.

Stuart Soroka, Professor, Communications and Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Option A is a beautiful home in California near good schools and job opportunities. But it goes for nearly a million dollars – the median California home sells for US$906,500 – and you’d be paying a mortgage that’s risen 82% since January 2020.

Option B is a similar home in Texas, where the median home costs less than half as much: just $353,700. The catch? Option B sits in an area with significant hurricane and flood risk.

As a professor of urban planning, I know this isn’t just a hypothetical scenario. It’s the impossible choice millions of Americans face every day as the U.S. housing crisis collides with climate change. And we’re not handling it well.

The numbers tell the story

The migration patterns are stark. Take California, which lost 239,575 residents in 2024 – the largest out-migration of any state. High housing costs are a primary driver: The median home price in California is more than double the national median.

Where are these displaced residents going? Many are heading to southern and western states like Florida and Texas. Texas, which is the top destination for former California residents, saw a net gain of 85,267 people in 2024, much of it from domestic migration. These newcomers are drawn primarily by more affordable housing markets.

This isn’t simply people chasing lower taxes. It’s a housing affordability crisis in motion. The annual household income needed to qualify for a mortgage on a mid-tier California home was about $237,000 in June 2025, a recent analysis found – over twice the state’s median household income.

Over 21 million renter households nationwide spent more than 30% of their income on housing costs in 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. For them and others struggling to get by, the financial math is simple, even if the risk calculation isn’t.

I find this troubling. In essence, the U.S. is creating a system where your income determines your exposure to climate disasters. When housing becomes unaffordable in safer areas, the only available and affordable property is often in riskier locations – low-lying areas at flood risk in Houston and coastal Texas, or higher-wildfire-risk areas as California cities expand into fire-prone foothills and canyons.

Climate risk becomes part of the equation

The destinations drawing newcomers aren’t exactly safe havens. Research shows that America’s high-fire-risk counties saw 63,365 more people move in than out in 2023, much of that flowing to Texas. Meanwhile, my own research and other studies of post-disaster recovery have shown how the most vulnerable communities – low-income residents, people of color, renters – face the greatest barriers to rebuilding after disasters strike.

Consider the insurance crisis brewing in these destination states. Dozens of insurers in Florida, Louisiana, Texas and beyond have collapsed in recent years, unable to sustain the mounting claims from increasingly frequent and severe disasters like wildfires and hurricanes. Economists Benjamin Keys and Philip Mulder, who study climate change impacts on real estate, describe the insurance markets in some high-risk areas as “broken”. Between 2018 and 2023, insurers canceled nearly 2 million homeowner policies nationwide – four times the historically typical rate.

Yet people keep moving into risky areas. For example, recent research shows that people have been moving toward areas most at risk of wildfires, even holding wealth and other factors constant. The wild beauty of fire-prone areas may be part of the attraction, but so is housing availability and cost.

The policy failures behind the false choice

In my view, this isn’t really about individual choice – it’s about policy failure. The state of California aims to build 2.5 million new homes by 2030, which would require adding more than 350,000 units annually. Yet in 2024, the state only added about 100,000 – falling dramatically short of what’s needed. When local governments restrict housing development through exclusionary zoning, they’re effectively pricing out working families and pushing them toward risk.

My research on disaster recovery has consistently shown how housing policies intersect with climate vulnerability. Communities with limited housing options before disasters become even more constrained afterward. People can’t “choose” resilience if resilient places won’t let them build affordable housing.

The federal government started recognizing this connection – to an extent. For example, in 2023, the Federal Emergency Management Agency encouraged communities to consider “social vulnerability” in disaster planning, in addition to things like geographic risk. Social vulnerability refers to socioeconomic factors like poverty, lack of transportation or language barriers that make it harder for communities to deal with disasters.

However, the agency more recently stepped back from that move – just as the 2025 hurricane season began.

In my view, when a society forces people to choose between paying for housing and staying safe, that society has failed. Housing should be a right, not a risk calculation.

But until decision-makers address the underlying policies that create housing scarcity in safe areas and fail to protect people in vulnerable ones, climate change will continue to reshape who gets to live where – and who gets left behind when the next disaster strikes.

Ivis García, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.