Free Trade--a Boon or Bust for Region? : Border: Conference debates what the trade pact could mean for San Diego and Tijuana. Experts are split on whether it would stem illegal immigration.

Free trade could make the San Diego-Tijuana region an economically and culturally dynamic, world-class metropolis or a polluted, chaotic haven for corporations exploiting cheap labor, according to experts who debated the region’s future Friday.

Presidential politics and negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement have pushed into national prominence the issues that have been ubiquitous along the U.S.-Mexico border during recent years.

The scholars, activists and businessmen who gathered Friday for a two-day San Diego-Tijuana Borderlands conference at Mesa College are part of an emerging industry whose output seems to rival the maquiladora sector: by producing seminars and conferences on the impact of free trade.

As Richard Sinkin of InterAmerican Holdings Co., a company that helps set up maquiladoras, pointed out, San Diego and Tijuana have led a “silent integration” of the U.S. and Mexican economies.

Trade between the countries has skyrocketed, and tariffs on 80% of the goods entering the United States have been lifted, Sinkin said at an afternoon discussion of border politics and economics. That makes the trade agreement important, chiefly as a way of formalizing and improving the way business is already being done, he said

“Free trade will effectively be a way of tinkering at the margins,” Sinkin said. “Two-way trade has doubled in three years.”

The San Diego-Tijuana urban area is the third-largest on the western coast of the Western Hemisphere, following Los Angeles and Lima, Peru. Its combination of low-tech and high-tech industries and academic centers makes it unique, Sinkin said.

“There is no other place like this on the border,” he said. “We are poised to become partners in one of the greatest success stories of the 20th Century.”

But Sinkin and other proponents of the agreement acknowledged that infrastructure, transportation and governments are overwhelmed by the current demands of the trans-border economy and unprepared for the future.

And Joe Francis, executive director of San Diego County Central Labor Council, offered a powerful critique. Echoing the fears of other U.S. labor leaders and some political candidates, he said the low wages, high pollution and persistent illegal immigration at the border are products of the maquiladora economy and precursors of things to come.

“The lure of cheap labor is irresistible,” Francis said, describing how multinational corporations have shifted production to impoverished countries with vulnerable and underpaid workers--Mexico, Guatemala, Bangladesh, China.

“In that process, thousands of American workers have been dislocated, lost their jobs,” Francis said. “Whole American cities have been decimated as employers joined the gold rush to Matamoros, Tecate, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. . . . The grim reality of poverty and pollution characterizes our relationship with Mexico.”

In contrast, others in the debate said the considerable economic benefit to San Diego of shoppers who cross from Baja California is just one example of the desirability of removing barriers.

“Shopping centers in the southern part of this county are totally dependent on consumers from Baja California, but that’s never raised,” said Augie Bareno, director of the San Diego County Trans-Border Affairs Department.

Francis responded that the pact will hurt those revenues by removing tariffs that make U.S. products more expensive in Tijuana and have drawn shoppers across the border.

Commenting on organized labor’s opposition, Bareno said Latinos in the United States have been loyal to unions, but expressed concern that the criticism of the free trade pact is tinged with jingoistic sentiments.

“There is another message there: The Mexican will take your job,” he said. “Hidden in anti-NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) sentiment is concern for the changing demographics of this state and this country.”

The discussion also touched on a problematic issue dominating relations between the two nations and between the border communities in particular, but which has been pointedly excluded from free trade negotiations: illegal immigration.

Although both the U.S. and Mexican administrations say a long-range economic benefit of partnership will be reduced illegal immigration, panelists Friday were more cautious.

Refugio Rochin, a UC Davis expert on agricultural communities in the United States and Latin America, said illegal immigration will continue and may be exacerbated by tough times in the Mexican farming states that already produce a great deal of migration.

Illegal immigration has not and will not be decreased by further development in border areas because wages are so low that Mexicans will pursue better opportunities to the north, Francis predicted.

“Illegal immigration has not diminished with the maquiladoras, it has increased,” he said.

Sinkin agreed that more development will draw more migrants to Mexican border states. But he said that will not necessarily create more illegal immigration. Many U.S. companies will locate in populous Mexican interior states, creating jobs for would-be migrants, because that is where the bulk of the Mexican consumer market is, he said.

Only gradually are decision-makers in Washington and Mexico City realizing the economic and political urgency of improving conditions in Tijuana-San Diego and other border regions, which were neglected in the past because of their distance, Sinkin said.

“It’s the politicians catching up to the business community,” he said. “Washington and Mexico City are way behind the curve. The border is at the cutting edge.”