美国国家公共电台 NPR As Trump Visits Calexico, Calif., Residents Worry About Rising Border Wall Tension（在线收听）

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President Trump is scheduled to visit the California border city of Calexico tomorrow. It's a city on edge, as are many others along the southwest border, after the president threatened to shut down the border. He's since walked that threat back, but that doesn't lessen the fears of local residents. From Calexico, Max Rivlin-Nadler reports.

MAX RIVLIN-NADLER, BYLINE: It's a little before 4 in the morning, but 25-year-old Alexandra Elizabeth Godoy has already been up for three hours. Every morning, the Mexican citizen crosses the border into Calexico from Mexicali. Godoy, along with dozens of other workers, is waiting for the buses that will take them to work, legally, on farms in the Imperial Valley. She's heard the president might shut the border.

ALEXANDRA ELIZABETH GODOY: My friends, they do see the news, and they have told me, what are you going to do if that happens? And I'm like, oh, I don't know what I'm going to do (laughter).

RIVLIN-NADLER: She supports her three kids by picking lettuce.

GODOY: I have to cross every day. So if it closes, I'm not going to be able to cross.

RIVLIN-NADLER: In a donut and coffee shop filled with farm workers from across the border, 45-year-old Enrique Javier, who has been working in the Imperial Valley for 30 years, says a border closure would be hard not only for farmworkers but for the entire city.

ENRIQUE JAVIER: (Speaking Spanish).

RIVLIN-NADLER: He says the marketplace would be affected; the taxi companies, the buses - everything would be impacted that works with Mexicans. While the president seems to be backing off the threat, Javier still thinks he's serious.

JAVIER: He (Speaking Spanish).

RIVLIN-NADLER: Workers are driven deep into the Imperial Valley, which is in the middle of its cabbage harvest right now. Jack Vessey is a fourth-generation farmer in Holtville, about 15 miles north of the border. Over half of his workers come from Mexico. All of these threats and the tension along the border is just not good for business.

JACK VESSEY: It's a region; it's not this fence or this line or this border. It's been there. It's been here for a long, long time. And to see the economic - the people passing back and forth, be it families, be it dollars, be it pesos - we live together.

RIVLIN-NADLER: South of the border in Mexicali, lots of businesses also rely on cross-border traffic. In the La Chinesca, a Chinese neighborhood in Mexicali, 25-year-old Hernan Gomez runs a barbershop with a group of friends. The neighborhood was founded by Chinese railroad workers who had been deported from the U.S. because of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Gomez has a lot of regulars from the U.S.

HERNAN GOMEZ: So if they were to close down, they would be affected because, well, it's a barbershop. Men like to stay fresh. You know, they like to - even sometimes when the wait is too long, we lose customers.

RIVLIN-NADLER: Some border crossings, like those in El Paso, have experienced wait times of up to seven hours to get into the U.S. because Customs and Border Protection staff have been pulled away to deal with huge numbers of asylum-seeking families. That's not happening yet in Calexico, but that might change as security ramps up for Trump's visit. The president is coming to commemorate the completion of what he calls his border wall. It's a 2-mile section of fence that was replaced in the last year with a 30-foot tall steel bollard barrier. Calexico City Manager David Dale says what we call that barrier is important.

DAVID DALE: That's our sister city in Mexicali. So they're like our brothers and sisters there, and so we say it's not a wall; it's a fence.

RIVLIN-NADLER: Calexico is already planning for protesters, including some who will launch a large, inflatable Trump balloon to greet the president's visit tomorrow. For NPR News, I'm Max Rivlin-Nadler, in Calexico.