Mom-and-pop stores in Kansas City catering to recent immigrants are facing a sharp downturn, with sales falling since Trump took office. Owners say customers are scared and holding onto their cash.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump’s immigration crackdown has frightened many recent immigrants, who are now holding onto their money. That is crushing small businesses in some areas where a lot of immigrants live. Frank Morris of member station KCUR has this report.
FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: Immigrants without legal status wield an enormous amount of buying power. The American Immigration Council says in 2023, it totaled nearly $300 billion. The money is often spent at stores along streets like Central Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
MORRIS: Lucy Angle (ph) opened a party store on the street, hoping to cash in on the traffic she saw last year. But she says that this year, the traffic died way down.
LUCY ANGLE: We saw it was a busy place, but right now, it’s just not like we saw it. Central Avenue is really slow.
MORRIS: She blames President Trump’s deportation drive for chilling this Hispanic business corridor.
ANGLE: Yeah, you can feel it. And hopefully, people – they’re going to start making their parties. But no, they’re not making anything.
MORRIS: A slowdown in immigrant spending is a big problem for Kansas City, Kansas. The city is more than a third Hispanic, many of them foreign-born. It also attracts immigrants from Asia, Africa. Edgar Galicia, who directs the Central Area Betterment Association, says shops and restaurants on Central Avenue tell him business is off 30- to 60%.
EDGAR GALICIA: All of them. All of them have reported lost in sales because once the witch hunt started, everybody’s afraid. Nobody wants to come out.
MORRIS: And when shoppers do go out, they’re often confronted with higher prices because many of the things recent immigrants buy are products imported from their home countries.
GALICIA: Right now, we feel attacked because not only are they going after our people, they increase our prices.
MORRIS: And it’s not just Kansas City, Kansas.
GALICIA: From New York to LA, from the state of Washington to Florida, up north, down south, everywhere is happening.
MORRIS: Big companies like Coca-Cola and Constellation Brands report that their Hispanic customers are withholding some of their $2 trillion in spending power. And Latinos aren’t the only immigrant group affected.
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MORRIS: At Jay’s Grocery in Kansas City, Missouri, Oredi Jay sells primarily to immigrants from Central Africa. He’s watched his sales plummet by half this year because his customers are nervous and his prices have spiked.
OREDI JAY: American-first policies, like the tariff, is impacting our business negatively, for sure, since especially me as an immigrant, as a refugee, we import a lot of food abroad.
MORRIS: A throw pillow-sized bag of dried sardines imported from Tanzania used to retail for $25. Now it’s $35. And bad as things are now for some immigrant businesses, they may be about to get much worse. Eric Rodriguez with UnidosUS says President Trump’s mass deportation drive is just ramping up.
ERIC RODRIGUEZ: The government immigration enforcement agencies still don’t have the resources they need to do it on the scale that they propose to do it. That’s coming.
MORRIS: The Republican tax and spending bill signed by President Trump last week includes as much as $170 billion for deportation operations. All that spending is likely to stoke more fear, keeping workers and shoppers at home and further starving mom-and-pop businesses. Edgar Galicia says the new tariffs make matters worse.
GALICIA: So it’s this whole bunch of things happening that are destroying our way of life, destroying the stability we have built on our own, destroying the lifelong investment that has been put into this place.
MORRIS: Galicia worries the immigration crackdown will wreck decades of steady progress on Central Avenue.
For NPR News, I’m Frank Morris in Kansas City, Kansas.
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