When fences go up instead of POE infrastructure, thousands of jobs and business enterprises are lost

Commentary:
By Barbara Zaragoza

In the past several weeks, a small construction crew has been putting up bollard fencing to seal another piece of the San Diego-Tijuana border near the Pacific Ocean. Until now that particular space has always been borderless due to the steep mountain terrain. The crew appears to have razed down portions of the mountain and created a smooth road on the American side for border patrol vehicles. The construction shows that the border fence is like a living organism that continues to grow and expand.

America’s obsession with fence building at the U.S.-Mexico line began in 1955 when people feared that Red China was deliberately smuggling illegal drugs through the border in order to dope up American youth and weaken capitalism. A chain link fence was constructed that ran from San Ysidro through the Tijuana River Valley. That fence remained for another four decades, until a series of economic blows in Mexico sent the peso spiraling. By the early 1990s, America’s response was Operation Gatekeeper: Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) increased security and replaced the chain link fence with military landing mat. The result: between 1995 and 2005 the number of illegal Mexican immigrants jumped up from 2.9 to 6.3 million.

Many attributed the increase to NAFTA, which was introduced at the same time. The free trade agreement dealt a devastating blow to farmers who could no longer compete with imported American goods. As a consequence, many Mexicans workers had to go North to provide for themselves and their families.

After 9/11 politicians once again enacted legislation to increase border security, often citing the potential for terrorist threats. According to an NBC News report, the CBP spent $2.4 billion between 2006 and 2009 to complete 670 miles of border fence. The result? Drug and contraband seizures nearly doubled. While illegal entries to the United States fell by 69% between 2006 to 2011, CBP said they could not account for the impact of the fence.

Now, H.R.399 or the “Secure Our Borders First Act,” wants to authorize $1 billion in spending each year from 2016 to 2025 to further increase militarization at the U.S.-Mexico line. The bill wants more fence construction and added technologies, such as subterranean surveillance and unmanned aerial vehicles. Interestingly, if the bill were to come into law, the Secretary of Homeland Security would be expected to provide metrics that weigh the effectiveness of the new security measures against the impact upon industry and jobs.

But don’t those metrics already exist?

The above numbers demonstrate the effectiveness of previous border building. What the media often fails to examine are the economic impacts on legal crossings when border building takes financial precedence over infrastructure improvements at the ports of entry.

Mexico is our third largest trading partner. In 2013 the two-way trade was $507 billion. Mexico was also our second largest goods export market.

For California, Mexico was the state’s number one export market in 2013, accounting for 14 percent of all California exports (or $23.9 billion). A full 99% of total trade between California and Mexico was transported by trucks.

Mexican shoppers have also been another vital economic stimulator for the San Diego and California economy. More than 68% of the 1.6 million people living in Tijuana cross the border to shop. They spend at least $6 billion a year, or more than $1 of every $8 in retail sales. That means the Mexican population pours at least $480 million sales tax dollars into the economy every year.

This number, however, is stifled due to America’s border security obsession, which fails to adequately respond to the needs of legal crossers. According to SANDAG, inadequate infrastructure at the ports of entry translate into an estimated loss of $7.2 billion in gross output and a loss of 62,000 jobs.

What’s more, in 2008 northbound vehicle crossings fell by 12.9 % and continued to decline each year thereafter. Declines up to 10% were also seen in individual crossings. While economists may point to the sub-prime mortgage collapse and the U.S. recession as the cause (the numbers have again been increasing in the last two years), the declines in crossings also happened to have coincided with increased border militarization.

Illegal immigrant crossings constitute anywhere from a high estimate of 2%, but more likely 0.2% of the total number of people crossing the border each year. Paul Carr, Supervisory Border Patrol Agent in the San Diego sector said that for 2013, Border Patrol made 27,496 arrests. That constitutes about the same number for one year as the number of legal law-abiding pedestrians who cross the border at the San Ysidro Port of Entry each day.

Even if we were to take a very inflated number, such as 1 million illegal crossings through the entire 1,954 mile range and compare that to the number of legal vehicle and pedestrian crossings per year at only the San Ysidro port of entry (where 50 million vehicles and pedestrians cross annually) we would still get a maximum of 2% illegal crossings, in comparison to the 98% of legal crossings done by individuals who will inject the U.S. economy with revenue.

A CRS Report for Congress estimated that illicit drug sale earnings ranged from $13.6 to $48.4 billion annually. That means H.R. 399 would spend $1 billion in taxpayer dollars on stemming an illicit trade that reflects 3% – 9.5% of the total amount of legal trade taking place.

Meanwhile, the federal government appropriated only $741 million for the entire reconfiguration of the largest land port of entry in the world, San Ysidro, even though reports show that by 2030 the number of vehicles and pedestrians at that port of entry could increase by 87%.

Spending a proportional amount of federal dollars to improve the infrastructure at the 47 ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border could provide a colossal stimulus to our economy, infusing many industries with revenue and creating thousands of jobs. On the other hand, exorbitant spending to seal the border could potentially send the economy into another recession.

Ever since Operation Gatekeeper, border militarization has been a unilateral project where the U.S. has kept Mexico out of the negotiations. The fence has always been constructed 3 to 300 feet away from the line, exclusively on American soil. As Washington D.C. continues to send our neighbor the message that they are a threat, could it eventually come to pass that Mexico will decide they’ve been slighted and disrespected one too many times? If they close their borders to the U.S., they’ll be taking $480 million in tax dollars and $507 billion in trade elsewhere, and perhaps, for example, to our other primary trade partners, Canada and China.