Bad for Business


In much of America, life has slowly slipped back into some semblance of normalcy after COVID-19 changed the world. And unless you live in a border town, you might not know about a strange holdover that’s devastating thousands of businesses. Amid the border crisis where record numbers of illegal immigrants are seemingly greeted with open arms, legal travelers from Mexico are restricted— if they want to come by car or on foot. Today, how that’s costing the U.S. billions.

For 12 years, David Chung has owned this shop in Laredo, Texas just a few blocks from the Mexican border.

Sharyl: How many employees did you have before Covid hit and what’s the status now?

David Chung: Before Covid hit, I had three full-time employees and one part-time on the weekends. Now I have no employees, just me and my wife. Some days I come to work by myself, I tell her just to stay home because all day there’s hardly any business.

While many American businesses are on the road to recovery they’re still stuck in neutral in border towns, like Laredo. That’s because the Mexican tourists these businesses have relied on for years are still forbidden.

Sharyl (On-Camera): While illegal crossers are coming in and accepted by the thousands, legal shoppers from Mexico are considered non-essential travelers and banned under COVID restrictions since March of 2020.

Sharyl: Can you tell me what’s happened to the business since the non-essential traffic has been closed from Mexico?

Chung: So we stayed closed for about six months until September. But, we reopened, but there was hardly any business because we were dependent on a lot of the businesses from Mexico because this is border and all of that was gone.

From here in Texas through New Mexico and Arizona, to California, thousands of businesses have shut down. Losses in U.S. border communities are estimated at $10 billion. Fewer sales, less income, less sales taxes for local government.

Rep. Henry Cuellar: It’s a ghost town.

Congressman Henry Cuellar represents Laredo. We met up in the struggling downtown section where he told me he can’t figure out why Mexican tourists can freely fly into the U.S., but aren’t allowed to drive or walk across the port of entry just a few blocks from here.

Rep. Cuellar: Homeland puts a blame on CDC, CDC puts a blame on Homeland.

Kush Samtani has operated his business, Special Electronics, in downtown Laredo since 1989, relying primarily on Mexican customers.

Kush Samtani: You know, there’s nothing here. I mean, we’re all bleeding and the borders have to open up so people can get back into business.

His shop used to bring in six figures a day, he says, but now he’s losing upwards of $10,000 a month, and won’t bring in a dollar today.

Sharyl: What was the shop like? You know, when it was busy and things were more normal and what is it like now?

Samtani: We’d had lines outside the door, people to pay. And it was full in here and people were buying TVs, electronics, and perfumes.

Sharyl: I believe air traffic is allowed to and from Mexico without these restrictions, but people can’t drive across or walk across here?

Samtani: I know that’s crazy. I noticed a lot of illegals crossing, but customers can’t cross, which doesn’t make sense.

Rep. Cuellar: Well there are contradictions along the border. Why is it that you can have a Mexican flying to the U.S. but then, and Mexican cannot drive across. I’ve asked them, “Why is it that undocumented people can come in, and why is it people can’t come in?” I’ve asked CDC the same question, their leadership, and they’re basically are telling me the same thing that “it’s complicated at the border.” It’s not complicated for us. We understand.

Questions about the policy and apparent contradictions heightened last month as thousands of Haitians stormed the border crossing illegally, with no vaccine requirements or COVID testing.

Saenz: We’ve been hurting. I mean, our downtown area is desolate. I mean, it’s dead. Just about over 120 storefronts have actually closed.

Laredo Mayor Pete Saenz says he has a novel idea that could help solve all concerns. Allow Mexican shoppers back in and offer them vaccines.

Mayor Saenz: Open up to nonessential so they can come into the U.S. and get vaccinated. And when they’re here, that may help our economy too, by shopping or staying at our hotels and restaurants and so on. So it’s encouraging, to hopefully invite these people and take care of their health needs, but also they could help us in economically as well.

Meantime, Chung says he’s not even making enough money to cover utilities at his shop.

Sharyl: How long do you think you can hang on without significant help or change?

Chung: Maybe another couple of months. At the time where I have to make a decision.

Just this past week, the Biden administration announced a reversal. Under pressure, and with the U.S. economy continuing to show strain, vaccinated travelers coming by land or ferry will finally be allowed back into the U.S. starting in November.

Rep. Cuellar: I think what got them convinced, uh, is just pressure, pressure, pressure. They had to understand that this was important to our economy. How do you lose $19 billion from the Mexicans that were coming over and shopping? And just yesterday I was downtown. It’s so sad. So sad to see so many businesses that closed up, but this Christmas, as you know, October, November, December, and January are so important for the border economies. This is going to be a very, very good Christmas.

It’s a year and a half too late for some but could be in time to save other businesses.

Samtani is holding out hope.

Samtani: We need our tourists, you know, we are a border front city. We’re the gateway to Mexico. We need our tourists to come here and shop.

Sharyl (on-camera): The shop owners say the fourth quarter is typically the best for business, and that the border can open ahead of the holiday season they say, some businesses will be able to recover a decent portion of their losses.

https://fullmeasure.news/news/cover-story/bad-for-business-10-14-2021


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4 thoughts on “Bad for Business”

  1. Sharyl and Full Measure Team,

    Sharyl, you have to stay in your lane!—not
    test the guardrails imposed by the POWERS
    that be.

    However, a bit of correction is in order :

    Conservatives fail in the culture wars for lack
    of creativity in the Naming Game; e.g. you’ve
    used “illegal immigrants“ where “Criminal Line-
    Cutters” ( my term ) would be far more HONEST/
    CORRECT, as those millions who had SUFFERED
    through the LAWFUL process are seriously, badly
    (emotionally) INJURED by the GROSS ease with
    which those Crime-Inclined, Line-Cutter, INVAD-
    ERS now reside in the U.S—MOCKINGLY, without
    punishment.

    Keep in mind, people-of-color LINE-Cutters are
    Anti-White racists, who’ll come to further margin-
    alize the FOUNDING race and Culture of White
    Western Civilization (( notice how the White face
    and White hetero-couples are disappearing from
    COMMERCIAL TV—White males and females
    always seen with a minority person of color )).

    -Rick

    1. P.S.

      — Vulture Businessmen LUST After Those Line-Cutting Invaders —

      =======
      ©1999

      Why Wall Street Capitalists Hate Families and Nationhood

      – – –

      Wall Street, Adolph Hitler, Red China and Republican Internationalists
      (( a/k/a vulture capitalists ))

      Republican internationalists have a vested interest in the destruction of the nuclear family and nationhood.

      Most corporate businessmen are not ethical people. Businessmen who are ethical reflect the good moral values of their neighbors, and they generally are found in small stores in small communities.

      President and Founder Thomas Jefferson said this about greedy businessmen: Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.

      Western merchants knowingly sold Hitler the means to wage war – and the chemical with which to gas millions – while contemporary “American” businessmen sell Red China the means to destroy our cities in a future confrontation.

      And if asked to explain their bottom-line self-interests, businessmen resort to their if-I-don’t-sell-it-to-them-somebody-else-will vulgarity, as if making the sale justifies the means and end.

      Do you really think Wall Street is a family-friendly financial center? No (and The Wall Street Journal is vulture capitalists’ champion rag. It stinks to high heaven of immoral compromise and anti-American duplicity).

      Most Wall Streeters are evil men and women who hide behind a clean but false veneer of business suits and Better Business Bureaus—which mostly protect unethical business practices not customers, and which veneer keeps you dumb and merchants rich.

      Free-trade Republicans mean just that—f r e e t r a d e!: no restrictions on the flow of people and goods, which kind of trade destroys family, community, and nation, to which argument a Republican internationalist might say, “But if I don’t destroy family, community and nation for profit, somebody else will.”

      America is becoming a free-trade brothel for anything-goes Global Commerce, which partly explains her moral and cultural decline (Marxist/socialist/feminist liberals play the other part).

      Why would a businessman want controls on culture-destroying immigration from the Third World? Every warm body sneaking across the border, and every legal immigrant, is a potential customer in retail stores. That’s why NAFTA was passed in the face of a coming, massive increase in crime and drugs—to infect Americans from and through Mexico, not to mention illegals (and drugs) smuggled on NAFTA trucks; and that’s why the tourist, airline, and communications industries don’t care who is legal and who is not. Citizenship and nationhood impede profits! The more influx of immigrants and “visitors” from outside the U.S. – the latter containing a large percentage of I’m-going-to-stay visa holders – the more air flights, hotel bookings et al., and long-distance telephone calls to overseas friends and relatives.

      Why would church and synagogue businessmen want controls on immigration? Catholic Charities and Jewish Family Services rake in millions each year by helping the State Department resettle diverse races in white communities across America, not to mention their recruiting members in the exchange. And religious organizations can gain by family breakups and cultural disruptions. During the every-one-can-get-rich Roaring Twenties churches and synagogues suffered poor attendance, but during the Great Depression membership shot up (during the Dark Ages, religionists ruled).

      Why would a businessman want controls on welfare? Every cent that you turn over for redistribution to welfare recipients is money you can’t save, but change jingling in capitalists’ pockets. Business owners don’t pay taxes but pass them on to customers. They’ll complain about high taxes stifling business, but they’d rather have confiscatory taxation for welfare recipients – to keep money out of savings and in circulation – than high saving rates among consumers.

      Why would a businessman want to reduce family breakups? Every family that falls apart is more money spent on lawyers, moving trucks, apartments, homes, household appliances, restaurants, hotel rooms and day care centers.

      Why would a businessman want a nation of stay-at-home moms who’ll prepare and serve meals at home, and instruct their children in moral virtue, rather than join the grubby workforce of fast-food addicts keeping all those artery-clogging outlets happy (now Third World nations suffer that anti-health, anti-family blight killing Americans)?

      Why would a businessman want controls on abortion? That industry puts billions of dollars in merchants’ pockets, which situation pits one kind of bad businessman against another: Killing wombed babies may make rich those merchants of death but the human slaughterhouses reduce population growth, which growth underpins capitalists’ economies—and which necessary underpinning explains Republican internationalists’ open-borders immigration policy in a nation of abortionists.

      Why would a businessman want controls on pornography? That industry puts billions of dollars in merchants’ pockets, helping to break up families and instruct each new generation on sex-gratification techniques for use outside the bonds of matrimony. Why commit to the rigors of family life when men and women can have sexual fun instead? And why uphold an institution that puts a drag on capitalists’ god:
      C o n s u m e r i s m ?

      Why would a businessman want controls on people-destroying gambling, tobacco and booze? Gambling is no less an evil than pornography, both of which are cancers on the nuclear family, community and nation. Tobacco pimps (businessmen) target children because they are easy prey and future addicts (customers). And now that nicotine pushers have been corralled because of all the sick and dying across America, booze companies have stepped up their drug-pushing ads everywhere—even though booze does far more harm to children, adults, community and nation than tobacco ever did!

      Why would a businessman even want nation-states to exist? Any block to the movement of people and goods impinges on trade and profit-taking. That’s why Sundays are no longer a day of rest.

      Why would “American” businessmen care whether you and your family are safe from Chinese nuclear rockets? They don’t, which is why American merchants McDonnell Douglas, Hughes Electronics and Loral Space and Communications betrayed their nation for profit, as Lenin predicted: “The capitalists of the whole world and their governments will close their eyes on the kinds of [grim and unscrupulous] activities I have described and will become blind as well as deaf-mutes. They will extend loans which will provide us with the equipment and technology we lack and will thus help rebuild our military industry, which we need to launch subsequent victorious attacks against our suppliers. In other words, the capitalist nations will always work to prepare their own suicide.”

      Why would our vulture-capitalist controlled House and Senate care about flag, family and nation when they draw their gains from traitorous capitalists working the halls to buy politicians’ influence?

      Profit is Republican internationalists’ god. Despise them. Hate them (read my essay, “The Internationalists”). Because while they gloat in their unbridled profit-taking, a tiny part of which they pass along to you to keep you distracted from what’s really at stake, your family and your nation – your lives and moral freedoms – are being traded away by them for mere profit; read my essay, “Capitalism and Marxism,” about how bad aspects of both destroy white Western civilization – the founding race and culture – in America.

      What does it profit a nation to gain all the world’s markets but lose its soul—its founding race and culture?

      P.P.S.

      The anthropological definition of the much-abused term, “nation,” is: “a people of common ancestry,” which definition fits the Founders’ America—now in steep moral, cultural, racial and financial decline [[ Note: While all extant – published – economic indicators are up, with Internet dot-com “businesses” marching stocks towards never-before-seen highs, the REALITY – the behind-the-scenes reality – is terrifying! ]].

      2021 Update :

      [[ https://www.wnd.com/2020/05/transnational-elite-empowered-china-expense/ ]]

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  2. I Like Tinkering with Sharyl Mind in What’s possible ( Strange New Discoveries known by Few ? )..LOL ? ” Re- Inventing Economics and Fighting Inflation “Give this other New Idea a Month to Ponder on in Think Tanking New Wheels of Economics ???. If you Re-invent U.S. Coinage and Start Adding different % of Titanium and Silver to U.S. coinage thus Driving up the Worth of Coinage Value in the U.S., What New Wheels of Fortune in the Worth of Money can that Wheel ??? Collectors Get Ready ???

  3. After one humdinger of a response, I couldn’t help but wonder at others you might have received that you didn’t print.
    Wow.

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