Across the River, Apart: Dearborn's Arab Businesses Weigh the Cost of the US-Canada Trade Fight
For generations, the drive across the Ambassador Bridge or the Detroit-Windsor tunnel has been a short one for Arab Canadians chasing a taste of home. Dearborn, Michigan — home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the country — has built a food and retail economy partly sustained by visitors from Windsor, Ontario, just a few miles away, where roughly 25,000 people of Arab descent live. This fall, that cross-border rhythm is being tested.
Qahwah House, a Yemeni coffee chain that has grown to 32 locations nationwide with three in Dearborn alone, says about 10% of its Dearborn business comes from Canadian customers. The company had licensing and registration in place to open a location in Toronto, home to a large Arab Canadian population, but has paused those plans. The reason: President Trump's escalating tariff fight with Canada, which included a threatened 50% tariff on Canadian imports this summer before a brief pause, followed by Canada's own retaliatory tariffs on roughly $20 billion in American goods that took effect in early September after trade talks broke down.
"Where it does affect us is that we are trying to expand into Canada," Qahwah House marketing director Mohamed Ahmed said, adding the company is also holding off on a furniture order from a Canadian supplier. "There's just been too much uncertainty."
The trade dispute, which has rattled industries from autos to agriculture across Michigan, is layered on top of an already-declining flow of Canadian visitors to the Detroit region, which tourism officials say has been down roughly 30% since early 2025 — well before this year's tariff escalation. Robert Nelson, a University of Windsor historian who studies cross-border food culture, said his informal research has found a split: Arab Canadians with family or work ties in Dearborn keep crossing regardless of politics, but some in Windsor's Arab community are traveling less as a form of quiet protest, opting to "support local" instead.
Not every business is feeling the pinch the same way. Khader Masri, who has run Masri Sweets on Dearborn's Schaefer Road for more than 35 years, said his regular Canadian customers — including families who drive in from as far as London, Ontario — have kept coming. "They are not thinking of any of that commotion," he said.
Still, the broader economic backdrop is strained. A spring survey by the Michigan Restaurant and Lodging Association found more than half of the state's food-service businesses reporting declining sales, a steeper drop than the roughly 39% reported nationally. Dearborn's chamber of commerce says it has not received formal reports of businesses struggling specifically because of lost Canadian traffic, and several restaurant owners declined to discuss the politically charged topic publicly — a reflection, observers say, of the Arab American community's broader wariness amid the Trump administration's wider immigration enforcement posture.
The tension sits alongside continued cross-border ties that predate the current dispute by decades: Dearborn's Arab restaurant scene has long been a draw for Windsor visitors making the short trip south, with food writers dedicating entire travel features to the suburb's offerings.
For now, businesses like Qahwah House are in a holding pattern, waiting to see whether the tariff standoff eases or hardens before committing capital across the border. "We'll see how that plays out," Ahmed said.