THE BORDER

The huge US-Mexican border connects two vastly unequal regions. It is both—the paradoxes are endless—the most porous border in the world and the most heavily guarded. It is a line that at once separates and unites two cultures, two languages, two economies.

Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, 199922

Of the nine Mexican states with the highest level of well-being, six are border states, and all have high levels of foreign investment. (By comparison, the three states with the lowest well-being are Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca, with very low levels of foreign investment.) Since the adoption of the neoliberal economic model, the economic gap between the border states and the rest of Mexico has widened, as foreign investment became concentrated along the border. Between 1975 and 2000, Mexican GDP increased at an annual rate of 0.8 percent, while in the border states it increased by 1.2 percent.23

Just as the greater wealth of the United States attracted job seekers from Mexico, the greater wealth of the border states attracted job seekers from further south. Job availability, plus the presence of many who came to use the border as a jumping-off place for entry into the United States, resulted in the border population increasing more rapidly than that of the rest of Mexico. Between 1975 and 2000, the border population increased by 2.5 percent annually, while that of Mexico increased by 2.3 percent. However, by the start of the twenty-first century, job creation away from the border exceeded that on the border. Between 2000 and 2005, of the six Mexican states with the most rapid population growth, only one—Baja California—was a border state.24

The U. S.—Mexican border, with 350 million crossings a year, is the most crossed border in the world. A substantial share of these crossings results from traffic generated by the maquiladora industry. The first maquiladoras were usually small operations located in old buildings and generating little cross-border traffic. However, more recently, the trend has been to locate maquiladoras— which are now much larger—in gleaming industrial parks built on city peripheries in locations well supplied with utility service and transport linkages. Ironically, by linking the border area even closer to the United States, the growth of the maquiladora reversed the gains of the National Border Program (PRONAF) of the 1960s.25

In 1998, Francisco Gaytan, of the economic development agency of the State of Chihuahua, estimated that 95 percent of the economy of Ciudad Juarez was based on the maquiladora. Gaytan commented, “Everything revolves around the maquiladora, and we have given absolute priority to its development.”26

This “absolute priority” accorded the maquiladora has come at the expense of the environment. Legislation protecting the environment is on the books, but enforcement is at best spotty, leading to worsening environmental problems. In addition to lax enforcement, there is a lack of infrastructure for treating hazardous substances, which results in endangerment of both workers and communities adjacent to maquiladora plants. The result of lax enforcement and non-existent hazardous-waste infrastructure was described in a 2001 New York Times article, “All along the border, the land, the water and the air are thick with industrial and human waste.”27

The border towns evolved into substantial cities whose population totaled 5.5 million in 2005. Their growth has been fueled not only by the maquiladora but by soaring cross-border traffic generated by NAFTA. The six largest border cities (in descending order by population) were Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, Mexicali, Reynosa, Matamoros, and Nuevo Laredo. Their populations ranged from

1.4 million to 356,000. As Hector Aguilar Camin and Lorenzo Meyer observed in 1993, “A new Northern Mexico is appearing at an astonishing rate, subject increasingly to a process of reindustrialization and integration with the U. S. economy.”28