NOGALES, Ariz. (KGUN) — For businesses that depend on cross-border commerce, the first hundred days of the Trump administration have been a wild ride of tariffs that have been on—off— and on again.
KGUN9’s Craig Smith reports from Nogales on how companies are trying to keep up.
We visited a warehouse in Nogales Arizona surrounded by some of the things that go into your daily life. A lot of the things may go back and forth across the Mexican border, two, three, four, maybe more times than that on their way to becoming a final product. And because of all those crossings, the tariff situation has been giving that business fits.
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Every morning Guilermo Valencia of Valencia International wakes up and wonders if his business changed drastically overnight. He helps clients send materials back and forth across the border.
“You think about this every day and what it's gonna happen tomorrow, and what's gonna happen tomorrow. So there's just been an onslaught of duties and onslaught of requests. Each customer wants to know well, does my product pay or does it not pay?”
By pay he means does the business have to pay a tariff? Before tariffs came back in a big way in the first hundred days of the Trump Administration, the answer was usually simple. It was usually no. Now the answer is…complicated.
Valencia’s warehouse has crate after crate of parts of car seats. Car parts are an example of how complex calculating tariffs can be. Valencia says car seats don’t require tariffs, but car door panels might.
He says the rules change and create confusion about when they changed.
“We had instances where duties came in at 12 o'clock, midnight, right? So we had a truck cross at 10 o'clock at night, and we thought it was duty free, but the duties kicked in at 12 o'clock midnight Eastern Standard Time.”
Valencia agrees that the Administration needed some leverage to force negotiations over drug and people smuggling but he asks why make trouble for honest businesses that help workers on both sides of the border?
Fruits and vegetables for your table may have passed through Jaime Chamberlain’s warehouses at Chamberlain Distributing. Except for three days of tariffs, his products escaped tariffs after the Trump Administration decided to abide by the trade agreement called USMCA.
He supports using trade pressure to get more help from Mexico fighting cross border crime but says if legitimate border business declines all Arizonans could feel it.
“You've got Arizona Department of Transportation that really has a lot invested in the infrastructure here and in fees that they charge for every truck to come across. You've got gas tax, hotel bed tax and food tax that American Canadian truckers that are coming in to pick up our whether it's our manufacturing goods or our fresh fruits and vegetables, they all contribute to the bottom line budget of the state of Arizona.”
He thinks renegotiating trade agreements with Mexico and Canada is part of the President’s plan and would like to see those talks get started.
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Craig Smith is a reporter for KGUN 9. With more than 40 years of reporting in cities like Tampa, Houston and Austin, Craig has covered more than 40 Space Shuttle launches and covered historic hurricanes like Katrina, Ivan, Andrew and Hugo. Share your story ideas and important issues with Craig by emailing craig.smith@kgun9.com or by connecting on Facebook and Twitter.
