US-Mexican border: two sides united by fear of Trump closure | American News

IIf you do what Donald Trump never did and cross the Paso del Norte International Bridge from El Paso, Texas to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, it's like entering a room of mirrors. Everything is the same, but not the same.

On either side of the bridge, there are the same large streets lined with shops, the same people who crowd around the merchandise. But the signs are different. On the American side of the bridge, they are in Spanish; on the Mexican side, in English.

In El Paso, they announce American consumer brands – Nike, Adidas, Hermes, Prada. In Juarez, they use cheap pharmaceuticals, dental care and wrinkle removal.

This is what trade looks like in the modern world. Thousands of Mexicans sweep north on the bridge in search of a commercial taste of the American dream, thousands of Americans crossing the south in search of eternal youth in the form of drugs cheap, porcelain teeth and botox.

It's 23,000 pedestrians a day, more than 7 million a year. United by a common language, whether in English or Spanish: the language of fear.

The fear that Trump will pbad with his threat, released Friday by one of his tweets and has doubled since then, to close the border. Fearing that with an executive pen stroke, Trump could break ties between the two cities for nearly 400 years, breaking hundreds of thousands of lives.

It does not matter which side of the bridge you are standing on. In this ice cream parlor everyone is saying the same thing.

"It would be the end for me," said Carmen, who has a clothing store on El Paso's side. "One hundred percent of my clients come from Juarez."

Marcela Coallo sells handbags in a shop called Bolsa Coketa. "We are all scared because we all depend on Mexicans," she said. "President Trump talks about helping American families, so why is he threatening our livelihoods?"

How long could Bolsa Coketa survive if the border was closed?

"A week maybe," she says. "It's as bad as that."

In response to the same question, Juan Aguilera, a pharmacist on the Mexican side of the bridge, has an equally grim answer. About 80 percent of his clients, he says, are US citizens who come to buy pharmaceuticals at unbeatable prices.

How long can it survive with a closed border – a week, a month, a year?

He's laughing.

"Days," he replied. "Just a few days."

Over the weekend, Trump said if he decided to close the border, "we'll keep it for a long time."

If the language of fear is not strong enough to reach Trump in the oval office, then maybe the language of the numbers will be better. Some 82 billion dollars of trade cross each year between El Paso and Juarez, in a set of interlocking economies that make it the fourth largest manufacturing center in North America.

At the national level, this represents an annual trade of $ 557 billion between the United States and Mexico. And he supports 5 million American jobs, many in the manufacturing sector, and many located in states – such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin – that have offered Trump his victory as president in 2016.

For a president who has been put to the White House largely because of his commitment to increasing American trade and protecting US manufacturing jobs, that's an impressive figure.

"It does not make sense as a manufacturing plan," said Tom Fullerton, professor of economics at the University of Texas at El Paso. "Discussing the border closure poses a risk to the US manufacturing sector by potentially disrupting the supply chains that support these industries."

Fullerton warned that in the short term, this could lead to bankruptcies and that in the long run companies would pull out of the border area. This posed an existential threat to the "maquiladora" industry: the complex interrelationship that generates hundreds of thousands of jobs on both sides of the border through US factories in Mexico that bademble auto parts and others originally built in the United States.

"Trade is not a zero-sum gain, where a job in Mexico is removed from the United States," said Jon Barela, CEO of Borderplex Alliance, which represents 250 cross-border companies and manufacturers. "On the contrary: in El Paso, a high-paying job is created for four jobs created in Juarez."

Once you leave the Ice Hall and return to El Paso via the Paso del Norte, you can see what Trump's radical rhetoric is all about. If you look from the side of the bridge, you can see behind a fence that a group of young women and infants are being held, sitting on the floor.

It is the asylum seekers from Central America who, says Trump, "invade" America and who must be arrested at any cost. From 50 feet on the deck, looking at them, they seem too small and helpless to deserve such agony.

"He says he's doing this to protect the United States, but that does not make sense," said Carmen at her clothing store in El Paso. "Why must it be so dramatic? It sounds like a provocation for me. "