Trump’s new tariffs could especially sting the Texas economy

The Donald Trump administration’s 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico started Tuesday, and their effects will ripple across the U.S. economy and abroad. But one state is particularly exposed: Texas. It has what amounts to roughly a $300 billion trade relationship with Mexico all on its own, which has supported hundreds of thousands of jobs and brought in billions in capital investment to the state.
New tariffs could raise the price of what Texans eat and drink. That includes beer, liquor, produce, agave, sugar, coffee and chocolate, said Emily Williams Knight, CEO of the Texas Restaurant Association.
They could also raise the prices of where Texans sleep.
“Softwood lumber, which is like your frame lumber, gypsum board, which is your drywall — all those are largely sourced in Canada and Mexico,” said Matthew Reibenstein, president of Royal Design Build and former president of the Greater Houston Builders Association. “These tariffs on the building materials would drive up the cost to build homes.”
Out in West Texas, oil producers, who get pipes from Canada and Mexico, could also feel the squeeze, said Karr Ingham, president of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers.
“There’s a lot of steel that is deployed in the business of drilling for and producing and transporting crude oil and natural gas,” he said.
In the trucking industry, which has boomed under free trade, John Esparza, CEO of the Texas Trucking Association, said he worries tariffs will increase the cost of semitrucks and decrease demand for trucking.
“That could mean less business and at a higher cost,” he said.
Many trucks operate out of Laredo, which is particularly exposed to tariffs, said Daniel Covarrubias, director of the Texas Center for Border Economic & Enterprise Development at Texas A&M International University.
“On a 30-mile radius here across the border, you have upwards of 1,500 logistics companies … transportation companies, customs brokers or logistics warehouses,” he said.
These firms grew out of decades of free trade. But now?
“You really rip up an entire supply chain that we’ve spent the last 50, 60 years building,” said Ray Perryman, an economist and president of the Perryman Group. “It really begins to impact employment in a significant way. Because of inflation, consumers have less money to spend.”
He said if tariffs are sustained, all states will feel it, but especially Texas because its economy is so integrated with Mexico’s.