Fewer Mexicans cross to shop in El Paso

Trump’s immigration, economic stances stemming flow over border

EL PASO — Stroll down S. El Paso Street on a Friday evening past shops named “House of Blouse” and “Best Choice Fashion” hawking three pairs of pants for $9.99 and you will find sidewalks teeming with shoppers as Latin music blares from store speakers.

Valerie Padilla and her boyfriend Diego Muñoz, both 16, recently lugged bags brimming with toilet paper, milk and avocados across the border bridge from downtown El Paso, where Padilla lives during the week, to family members in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Alfredo Gomez and his nieces carried a child’s kitchen play set and plastic teapot from the dollar store for a relative’s birthday.

Tens of thousands of people cross the three bridges between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez daily, visiting friends and family, going to school and work, or simply to shop, contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to El Paso’s economy each year.

Fifty-two cents out of every dollar spent at Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso is traced back to Mexican nationals, according to Tanny Berg,

a commercial real-estate developer who co-founded the Central Business Association. The Paso del Norte International Bridge is one of the busiest pedestrian border crossings in the world, said Berg, who serves on a local advisory group for Homeland Security.

But the flow of commerce has shown signs of slowing as anxieties grow over President Donald Trump’s immigration and economic policies.

As bustling as the scene can be in downtown El Paso, it used to be even more robust. Retail sales to customers from northern Mexico account for between 8 percent to 14 percent of total retail sales in El Paso in any given year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

But between the protracted weakness of the peso and the hostility Mexicans feel from Trump’s rhetoric, sales to residents of northern Mexico are projected to be on the lower end in 2017, said Tom Fullerton, an economist at the University of Texas at El Paso and head of the university’s Border Region Modeling Project. Still, he estimates that customers from northern Mexico will account for approximately $980 million of retail sales in El Paso in 2017.

“The (businesses) in El Paso are extremely dependent upon the Mexican nationals,” Berg said.