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EL PASO, Texas – What does President Joe Biden mean when he says “close the border”? Or when former President Donald Trump spoke during his campaign?
For example, Adair Margo wants answers. The art historian and former First Lady of El Paso is constantly traveling back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border, heading to Ciudad Juárez. This argument means different things to people living near the border than it does to politicians in Washington, D.C., nearly 3,000 miles away.
“No one has a clear understanding of their own language,” Margo says. Attempts to close borders “are like putting a massive lockdown in the middle of the region.”
Republicans rejected a bipartisan border security bill last week after months of negotiations and repeated calls to “close the border.” But political rhetoric surrounding the U.S.-Mexico border is likely to intensify further this presidential election year.
This has frustrated many border residents whose livelihoods depend on both sides and who fear they will lose their freedom of movement. Border restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic, implemented under federal emergency orders, left a bitter taste that few have forgotten.
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According to an analysis of U.S. Census data by the Southern Border Communities Coalition, 19 million Americans live along the 2,000-mile-long U.S. southern border. Another 11 million people live on the Mexican side.
“When you talk about closing borders, it’s a scary thought for people who live here,” said Jeremy Slack, a geography professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. “The community extends beyond international flights.”
Transnational rhetoric has real-world effects
Border residents know better than anyone the economic and emotional toll of repeated migrant humanitarian crises. They also know that borders cannot be opened and closed like drawers.
Metro El Paso and Juarez make up the largest binational community on the border, with approximately 2.7 million people. Every day, thousands of people cross one of the four international bridges to work in hospitals, day care centers, universities, construction sites, warehouses, factories, stores and companies. They head north to El Paso and south to Juarez.
A local Facebook group called Bridges Report (“Reporte de Puentes” in Spanish) has 348,468 members and crowdsources information about border wait times, which locals like the weather. Checking. Messages continue to pile up day and night, including pictures of the flow of red taillights and notes about line lengths.
Fernanda Soto, 20, lives in Juarez and studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is preparing for her career in the medical field. The campus is located in the foothills of the Juarez Mountains, overlooking the Juarez area and the Rio Grande River. The north shore is lined with razor wire laid down by the Texas National Guard, entangled with the torn clothes of migrants.
Soto said she doesn’t pay much attention to the news, but she did hear Biden’s comments about closing the border. “Everyone is talking about it,” she said.
During COVID-19, border residents survived 597 days of border restrictions under the Trump and Biden administrations, while Soto, a dual citizen, attended high school in the United States. His Mexican father missed his senior year basketball season due to restrictions.
But “even during COVID, we didn’t really close down,” she said. U.S. citizens were still able to cross the border, and hundreds of thousands did so every month.
Juárez Mayor Cruz Pérez Cuellar recently criticized Biden’s “hardened rhetoric” in response to Trump’s lead in the Republican primary.
“Both the United States and Mexico are in election years,” he said at a news conference last month. “This is something that ‘fronterizos’ and Mexicans know how to deal with.”
Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the U.S. Immigration Council, said Biden, Trump and others’ vows to “close the border” are political rhetoric and are unlikely to affect U.S.-Mexico ports of entry. Stated. They use that word to signal that they intend to “get tough” on illegal immigration.
But Lind said, “Rhetoric has policy implications,” adding, “The border is a real place, and policies in Washington, D.C., have real consequences on the ground.”
Border congestion negatively impacts business and employment growth
Commercial cargo traffic was backed up at the border last September when Texas Governor Greg Abbott added border checks as part of Operation Lone Star. On one El Paso Juarez bridge, a line of trucks snaked six miles back into Mexico, snarling traffic for hours.
Ray Perryman, a Texas economist and CEO of Waco-based financial analysis firm Perryman Group, said a one-minute delay at the border equates to a $778,000 loss to the U.S. economy. Ta.
“The border is more than just a crossing point for migrants,” said John Barrera, executive director of the El Paso-based Borderplex Alliance, a privately funded regional economic development initiative.
Immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border and in El Paso hit record highs in 2023. But like many things border-related, El Paso’s leaders see immigration as a logistics issue: how to temporarily protect people and direct those who are legally released. There is a tendency to grasp. This is to ensure that migrants can travel safely to their destinations.
Despite a spike in encounters with immigrants, El Paso remains among the top five safest large cities in the United States, according to an analysis of FBI crime data by MoneyGeek.com.
“I’m always frustrated by the perception of our region,” Barrera said, “parachuting into our region for less than a day, taking the obligatory photo-op, and then actually meeting the U.S. “To people who declare themselves to be experts on the Mexican border.” They simply don’t understand the importance of the US-Mexico relationship. ”
Last year, Mexico overtook China to become the United States’ largest trading partner. According to Forbes magazine, the United States had $798.8 billion in trade with Mexico, the largest annual trade ever with a single nation.
Perryman said Texas-Mexico trade alone supports more than 8 million jobs in the United States. But transnational rhetoric can have unintended consequences.
The economic slowdown in 2023 “due to inefficiencies” including Abbott’s border checks led to an estimated loss of $1.6 billion in gross product and about 16,750 jobs in the border region, he said.
False impressions endanger communities and border officials
Sometimes dogs wander across the border from Juarez to El Paso.
In that case, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents call Ruby Montana. She runs her online group called Bridge Pups Rescue, which introduces stray cats to her foster and adoptive families.
“If it’s an agent who loves dogs, and a lot of agents will call me and pick up a puppy,” she said.
She said the onslaught of images of hundreds of migrants and military vehicles wrongly portrayed “the border as a scary place.” It’s not a border she knows.
A Reclaim the Border convoy, calling itself the “Army of God,” passed through El Paso in January on its way to Eagle Pass, Texas, but failed to find the promised “invasion.”
Last week, the FBI arrested a Tennessee man who was planning to head to the Texas-Mexico border as a sniper to stop an immigrant “invasion.”
In 2019, a Dallas man posted a racist slur online using the same word “invasion” before breaking into an El Paso Walmart with a high-powered rifle. He pleaded guilty to federal firearms and hate crime charges in connection with the deaths of 23 people, most of them of Mexican descent, and was sentenced to 90 consecutive life sentences.
CBP and Border Patrol agents were the first to respond to the scene.
The Border Patrol’s El Paso Division has approximately 2,400 officers tasked with enforcing ever-changing border policies. If the bipartisan border bill were to fail, it would have allocated funding to hire more staff and support border security missions.
Many agents trace their family roots to Mexico, but often say they won’t go there for safety reasons. But some people do.
One agent regularly drives to Juarez to groom his dog and visit family. An El Paso taxi driver rattles off the name of the CBP agent who called for a ride to the Juarez airport. They say they prefer to fly domestically when vacationing in Cancun or Puerto Vallarta.
The border looks different depending on where you are standing.
From an observation deck in the Franklin Mountains in El Paso, you can’t tell where the United States ends and where Mexico ends. The 30-foot-tall border fence looks like a pencil line.
In March, runners cross that line at the annual El Paso Juarez International 10K.
Nicole Antebi grew up on the Rio Grande in El Paso. The filmmaker is holding a double exhibition of his animated film “100 Partially Obscured Views” at the El Paso Museum of Art and the Ciudad Juárez Museum of Art.
“Everywhere you go to buy groceries in El Paso, the cashier will call you ‘mija,'” she said, using the Mexican expression for “my child.”
“A lot of the stories come from other places and are projected onto this place in a very narrow and negative way,” she said. “It breaks my heart.”
margo, The former El Paso first lady is disgruntled but unfazed by today’s political winds.
She leads tours to Juarez, taking visitors to the original Franciscan mission that predates the existence of the U.S.-Mexico border by nearly two centuries. She is a steadfast cheerleader for the binational community.
“We’re doing the best we can and I don’t want to see that interrupted,” she said. “This is my home and we live on both sides.”
Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com, X @laurenvillagran or on Instagram @fronteravillagran.
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