The Troubled Mexican-American Border

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

University of Arizona historian Oscar Martinez, in his 1994 book Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, developed four models of interaction in the borderlands between countries: alienated, coexistent, interdependent and integrated. There may be elements of more than one in each case, but one usually predominates.

Alienated borderlands have virtually no cross-boundary interchange, due to warfare, political disputes, or ideological or religious animosity. Tension prevails and there are rigid controls over cross-border traffic. North and South Korea share such a border, as do Israel and Syria. 

Coexistent borderlands have limited cross-border interaction. There may still be disputes about the location of the border. The Russian-Chinese and Indian-Pakistani borders are examples.

Interdependent borderlands: In this case the borderlands of the two countries are symbiotically linked and there is a mutually beneficial economic system. Often the productive capacity of the wealthier country is matched with raw materials and cheap labour in the poorer one. Such has been the Mexican-American border.

Finally, there are integrated borderlands, where most existing barriers to trade and movement are eliminated and capital, products and labour move without restrictions. Internationalist ideology emphasizes peaceful relations and each country relinquishes a significant part of its sovereignty for the sake of mutual progress. This is largely the case within the 27-member European Union.

In interdependent and integrated borderlands, relatively unimpaired interaction makes it possible for people to participate in social systems that foster trade, consumerism, tourism, migration, cultural exchanges, and personal relationships.

Ethnic or cultural affinity enhances transnational interaction. Thus the American-Mexican border has always had intense activity because of the presence of large numbers of people of Mexican descent on the American side. They fused a highly interdependent bi-national system.

A strong border culture set the area apart from the main culture in either the United States or Mexico. Some cities have been almost unified entities: for example, Brownsville-Matamoros, Laredo-Nuevo Laredo, and Ciudad Juarez-El Paso, in the Rio Grande Valley; and Calexico-Mexicali and San Diego-Tijuana along the California border.

But things have changed for the worse in recent years. With increasing pressure on this border through illegal immigration and narco-trafficking, the frontier is becoming highly militarised. Is an interdependent border becoming a coexistent one?

There has been an anti-immigrant backlash on the American side. When Americans think of “the border,” they think of Mexico, not Canada. And it only too often relates to undocumented migrants and drug smugglers.

This has become a major political issue, and has become part of the larger debate about immigration reform. Washington now spends $18 billion a year trying to secure its border with Mexico; some 20,000 border patrol officers now guard the border. As well, a 1,030-kilometer barrier has been built between the two countries.

U.S. President Barack Obama met with his Mexican counterpart, Enrique Pena Nieto, in early May. U.S. officials are concerned that the new Mexican government, in office since last year, seems less inclined to provide the same level of deep coordination with U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies as its predecessor.

The border stretches for 3,169 kilometres, 595 of them in Arizona, and that state has gone furthest in attempting to control illegal movement across the border. The mistrust is exemplified by the high concrete and steel fence that now separates Nogales, Arizona, from Nogales, Sonora.

The writer Paul Theroux visited Nogales last year. He wrote about his experience in “The Country Just Over the Fence,” in the New York Times of Feb. 26, 2012. “In a lifetime of crossing borders I find this pitiless fence the oddest frontier I have ever seen — more formal than the Berlin Wall, more brutal than the Great Wall of China, yet in its way just as much an example of the same folie de grandeur. Built just six months ago, this towering, seemingly endless row of vertical steel beams is so amazing in its conceit you either want to see more of it, or else run in the opposite direction.”

In the 1990s, I visited the border between Texas and the Mexican state of Tamaulipas twice, once at Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, the other time between McAllen and Reynosa. Though it’s just a short walk or drive across the Rio Grande River, the difference is indeed astounding. It is a divide between an industrialized country and one far poorer.

The border cities were already dangerous places, and I didn’t tarry. Drug gangs have since made them considerably worse.