Follow Up to March 15 Post: “Our Two-Pesos: Today’s Travel Warning for Mexico…”

Just a quick update to our Opinion/Analysis from last Monday, about the change in the status of the U.S. State Department’s travel advisory — downgrading (again, in essence) the Mexico Travel Alert to a more ominous Travel Warning. It was our opinion that State Department rules require a Travel Warning to be issued when consular employees or their families are authorized to depart a country, and this was at the heart of the change from Alert to Warning. We cited a section of the Consular Affairs Manual: “[a] Travel Warning must be issued whenever a post goes to authorized or ordered departure status.”

Notably, most media missed this detail, and attributed the change to purely security issues. Well…just to underscore the value of analysis and research…[read more]

Our Two-Pesos: Today’s Travel Warning for Mexico – What Does it Mean?

Yesterday, Mexico joined a long list of countries — including Colombia, Eritrea, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iran (among others) — on the U.S. State Department’s Travel Warning list. This Warning comes only three weeks after the State Department issued a Travel Alert for Mexico — one that used more than 80% of the same text as used in a previous Alert, and was the subject of our blog posting on February 25th, “Is New U.S. State Department Travel Alert on Mexico Fair?”

What has prompted this change — the “downgrading” of Mexico (in essence) from an Alert to a Warning? The sad facts are…[read more]

Spring At-Border Surveys Underway – Otay Mesa & San Ysidro POEs

If you’re seeing bright yellow shirts with the US-Mexico region and big words saying “CrossborderSurveys” on them… then you know that Crossborder Group staff is hard at work conducting at-border surveys!

Over the next few weeks, you’ll find our crews at the Otay Mesa and San Ysidro Ports of Entry, surveying northbound border crossers about a variety of subjects.  Beyond questions related to crossborder shopping and economic impacts, we’re also collecting some insights about crossborder insurance and perceptions of security.

One other new set of data also will relate to time:  we’re doing some random sampling of car crossings to better understand the time-savings for inspections of SENTRI versus regular cars crossing at those POEs.  Look for some new reports and data coming out in late-April — and feel free to contact us at Answers@CrossborderBusiness.com if you have any questions!

Crossborder's Staff Surveying SENTRI Border Crossers - Otay Mesa

Crossborder Insights: A View of North American Unemployment By State/Province – Late 2009

As California’s unemployment rate actually edged up a few more notches to 12.5%, and the overall employment picture in the U.S. continues to be one of cautious optimism, Crossborder’s review of North American employment data through the end of December 2009 underscores the broad nature of job-losses throughout this interconnected economy.

Our most-recent CrossborderInsights brief (below) notes…[read more]

Yikes! Hostway.com (our webhost company) is having world-wide outage this morning…

…please be patient as they get service back up for all of their customers (including us) in the next few hours…

Update:  thankfully….at around 11am, things are again back up to normal on our CrossborderBusiness.com, CrossborderTours.com, and CrossborderSurveys.com websites…

Client News: Tijuana EDC & Industry Leaders Announce 1st International Aerospace Forum on March 17-19, 2010

Some good news today out of Tijuana — related to the upcoming March 17-19 International Aerospace Supplier Forum being organized later this month. Previously, Crossborder had developed an Aerospace/Defense Industry Fact Sheet for our client (the Tijuana EDC [DEITAC]), and today our CrossborderComunica marketing team distributed the following press release about Mexico’s “1st International Aerospace Supplier Forum” to business media contacts in the U.S. and Mexico…[read more]

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