Immigration, Agriculture, and the Border

Abstract

The Mexico-US border highlights population and economic growth in an “artificial” desert environment—there would not be 12 million residents along the 2000 mile border if it were not an international border. For most of the 20^th century, there were only three major population centers along the border: the lower Rio Grande Valley, the El Paso-Juarez area, and the San Diego-Tijuana area. There were one million residents along the border in 1942, but then the border-area population became to grow, especially on the Mexican side, during the 1942–64 Bracero program, under which Mexicans could work legally on US farms. The border area population grew even faster after the maquiladora or foreign-owned assembly plant industry expanded in the wake of peso devaluations in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 2000, there were 6.5 million people in the counties along the US side of the border, and 5.8 million on the Mexican side—the total border area population rose 50 percent in the 1990s, from 8 to 12 million, and is projected to double to 24 million by 2020. The border area’s major economic engine is manufacturing and related services—some 1.4 million Mexicans are employed in 3,500 border-area maquiladoras, and the presence of these assembly plants explains much of the population growth on both sides of the border in the past two decades. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was expected to divert the industrialization of Mexico away from the border, but has so far not had this effect.

The Mexico-US border area in the 21^st century is at a crossroads. Irrigated agriculture is shrinking on the US side, and not growing significantly on the Mexican side—scarce water is likely to be diverted from irrigating crops to higher value urban uses. Wages are lower but unemployment and poverty rates on the US side of the border are typically 2–3 times higher than the US average (San Diego county is the exception). By contrast, the Mexican side of the border is marked by higher-than-average wages and lower-than-average unemployment: maquiladoras constantly advertise for workers, population growth outstrips infrastructure development, and traffic to move goods, migrants, and shoppers across the border leads to significant waits at border crossings. Thus, the people picture of the border is one in which Mexicans migrate from poorer inland areas to what is for Mexico and relatively rich area, and the American residents along the border are largely Mexican-Americans with relatively little education and skills (San Diego is the exception).