Colorado Democrats say Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump can soften his anti-Mexico stance all he wants, but the economic damage has already been done in key tourism markets like Vail that rely heavily on year-round Latin American visitors.

Representatives of Trump for Colorado counter that Democrats are engaged in fear-mongering in order to get Hillary Clinton elected president and that Trump will continue to pivot away from his primary-season rhetoric about Mexican rapists, mass deportations and making Mexico pay for a border wall.

“The damage of Trump’s words goes well beyond the families he directly offends,” U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, D-Boulder, told The Colorado Statesman. “It hurts business, it hurts jobs. He’s proposed withdrawing from NAFTA, the WTO. It would cause an enormous image problem in the Latin American world and in Mexico, and of course we’d see a major decline in tourism from those areas.”

According to town of Vail economic development manager Kelli McDonald, 10 percent of Vail’s visitation is international, primarily from Mexico, and the ski town also has a thriving sister-city relationship with the artist and resort town of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

“We’ve got a lot of connections, and for Vail, it does go back generations, because you’ve got the families who started coming here [in the 1960s], and obviously they brought all of their family members and their friends and they purchase real estate,” McDonald said.

Republican Floyd Trujillo, a Littleton oil and gas industry consultant recently named to the Hispanics for Trump campaign, told The Statesman that Western Slope resorts reliant on Mexican tourism and legal immigrant labor have nothing to worry about from a Trump presidency. Polis and Clinton, he said, are just stirring up concern among Hispanics.

“It’s a fear factor. The Democrats use fear as a way to change elections rather than talk about the real issues in this state that everybody’s concerned about – everybody who has a child, everybody who has a daughter or wife should be concerned about, OK?” Trujillo said. “I’m tired of the race card being used to put people in fear.”

Trujillo added he believes Trump will be coming out with a “surprising” immigration policy in the coming days and weeks before the Nov. 8 election.

“Take a look at elections across the board,” Trujillo said. “People pivot one direction or the other to try to at least win the primary with their base. You’ll see where Hillary Clinton has gone hard left even way beyond Bernie Sanders. Now will she come back to the middle? I haven’t seen it yet.”

Last week, however, a Trump spokeswoman referred The Statesman to the candidate’s official position on immigration still live on Trump’s campaign website. It blasts “wealthy, globetrotting donors” clamoring for cheap labor and claims Mexico has taken the United States to the cleaners through one-sided trade deals and should be forced to pay for a border wall. Polis calls that kind of rhetoric divisive and dangerous.

“Trump is recklessly attacking Americans and separating us from one another rather than bringing us together,” said Polis, whose 2nd Congressional District includes the Vail Valley. “One day he attacks Americans because of their Muslim faith. The next day he attacks Americans because of their Latino heritage, and it’s really, fundamentally an un-American way of looking at things, and it’s one the American people will see through. That’s why Hillary Clinton will win this November.”

Trujillo, who last year considered a run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Michael Bennet, said the Democratic Party has tried to “enslave Hispanic people” for decades, but that with the right messaging Latinos will back Trump and help him to victory in November.

“The Democratic Party, they want welfare to take care of you,” Trujillo said. “You know what I say? ‘Get your hands off of me, I’ll take care of myself.’ That’s where the Hispanic people have that pride within themselves that they’ll go out there and have an impact on this country.”

Emmy Ruiz, state director for the Hillary for Colorado campaign, said Trump’s incendiary statements about Mexico have brought volunteers and supporters into Clinton campaign offices on the Western Slope and all across Colorado.

“There are consequences to his rhetoric,” Ruiz said. “People are scared, people are embarrassed and worried the effects on the economy. Donald Trump tweeted that soon we’ll be calling him ‘Mr. Brexit,’ and here’s the thing for Colorado, Coloradans really think though our policies. We take a lot of pride in folks who are thoughtful in their policies and their approach.”

Republican state Sen. Ray Scott of Grand Junction, the Western Colorado field coordinator for the Trump campaign, said “people are really fired up” and asking for yard signs and volunteering in numbers he’s never seen before, especially compared to the Mitt Romney campaign in 2012.

“This has been a very interesting movement that we’re seeing,” Scott said, acknowledging Trump’s rough edges. “The points been made fairly well nationally that he’s saying what everybody’s thinking. It’s unusual for politicos, if you will, to say exactly what people are thinking, because they tend to tell people what they think they want to hear, not what they need to hear.”

But that candor has some in the tourism industry leery of losing Latin American visitors. Mexican visitation to Colorado has grown from 104,178 in 2009 to 175,301 in 2015, according to Tourism Economics. Vail officials would not directly address the political debate over Mexico and immigration reform, but they will speak about the importance of the Mexican market.

“Our Latin American guests are very important to Vail Resorts, and Mexico in particular is one of the top international geographic areas for skiers and snowboarders who like to visit Vail,” said Johnna Escobedo, Vail Resorts senior manager of international communications.

“Mexicans have been vacationing in Vail since the ’60s or early ’70s when a number of Mexican families made a substantial investment in Vail real estate, and now generation after generation continues to travel to Vail,” she added.