Border businesses
Since Trump announced the ban, Marie Aguado has canceled three trips: business travel to Los Angeles, a visit to see her brother in Austin and a family vacation to Disney World.
“We’re afraid to leave,” said Aguado, an American who lives in Mexico City with her French-born husband and two daughters. She asked to be identified by her middle and last names for fear of government retribution.
“I’m dead serious about not going home,” she said. “When the ban happened, I was thinking of my children.”
Aguado’s oldest daughter was born in Dubai. The other was born in Mexico City. Both are also French citizens.
“I was just thinking they’re going to see my daughter was born in the Middle East,” she said. “And then what’s going to happen? I got totally freaked out and said to my brother, ‘I’m not coming to see you anymore. Come see me.’ ”
Just one more wrinkle, she said: Her brother’s wife is a green-card holder from Ukraine.
“They’re afraid to travel, too,” Aguado said.
That fear of leaving — and re-entering — the United States has led to a slowdown in traffic to Mexican border cities, which have long been popular destinations for shoppers and those seeking cheaper health care.
Francisco Vazquez Michel, a Mexican dentist in the border town of Nogales, said that 80 percent of his clients are Mexicans or Hispanics living in the United States, who cross the border for less-expensive care. Now about half as many as usual are coming, he said.
“They are very afraid, and it’s fear that Donald Trump put into Mexicans,” he said. “One day, not long ago, all of our appointments [were] canceled in one day, because the rumor went around that if people crossed, they would lose their visas.”
The president of the Nogales chamber of commerce, Carlos Jimenez Robles, said that the number of shoppers crossing into Mexico had dropped by 40 percent.
“We have seen a hardening by border agents, where they have more questions for people, more doubts about who people are,” Jimenez said. “Not only with tourists, also with American citizens.”
‘We’re not anti-American’
Not everybody reported an immediate slowdown in business.
“It hasn’t made a difference to us,” said Nayan Patel, owner of the Georgetown Inn in Washington. “America is still America — we’re still a democratic country full of opportunity — and that’s enough to get people to come here.”
Small World Vacations, a travel agency in New Jersey that specializes in Disney vacations, hasn’t noticed much of a drop-off, either. It has received just one cancellation this year, from an Iranian American with a German passport. He didn’t want to leave on a Disney cruise to the Bahamas out of fear he wouldn’t be allowed back into the country, said Sue Pisaturo, the agency’s founder.
“We do get our share of international travelers from every country — even countries I’ve never heard of — but so far it’s business as usual,” she said.
That’s not the case, though, at Westmount High School in Montreal. Seniors there had been planning their graduation trip for months.
“We usually go to New York but decided this year to go to Washington,” teacher Sabrina Jafralie said. “The kids were overjoyed.”
They were drawn to the capital, she said, by the new African American History museum and were interested in visiting the Holocaust Museum.
One hundred students signed up. Then the Trump travel ban hit. Jafralie, who is Canadian-born but whose father emigrated from India 40 years ago, realized that four of the students were from Iran. They held Canadian visas but weren’t Canadian citizens. Students from Pakistan and Sri Lanka also expressed concern.
They had read a number of media reports about people being stopped at the U.S. border for long interrogations. A Montreal-area woman wearing a hijab was blocked from going on a day-long shopping trip to Vermont, while a Canadian-born woman of Indian descent was told she would need a visa to enter the United States for a weekend spa visit.
After long, sometimes agonizing discussions with her students — Jafralie teaches ethics — they agreed to go to Toronto instead.
“We decided that we were not prepared to leave any students behind,” she said. “It’s not a political boycott on our part. We’re not anti-Trump. We’re not anti-American. We’re anti-not-being-together. We’re a family, and we travel together.”
