The Downside of the Border Boom

In recent weeks, local newspapers have published numerous reports on the Border Patrol’s Operation Gatekeeper, noting both its success in pushing immigrants eastward and the downside of illegal camping and damage to the ecosystems of the forests and canyons near the border. Talk-show hosts and congressmen have joined the chorus, arguing that illegal immigration has suddenly become a major environmental threat. But to environmentalists on both sides of the border, this is old news.

For years, environmental organizations have addressed serious pollution and resource management problems in Mexico as well as the United States, from Imperial Beach to Matamoros. But missing from the latest anti-immigrant, pro-environment arguments is acknowledgment of the culpability of foreign-owned manufacturing plants, known as maquiladoras, operating in the free-trade zone along the border.

The maquiladoras are primarily responsible for the migration of thousands people from southern Mexico into border communities. “Tijuana may well be the world’s most rapidly burgeoning large city, having grown 61% in the 1980-90 period,” is the assessment of one report on the environmental impact of maquiladoras. In Tijuana, the number of maquiladoras has increased 24% just since 1995. While maquiladora jobs are low-paying by American standards, they are immensely attractive to Mexicans facing high unemployment in the south.

Unfortunately, border municipalities cannot keep pace with the accompanying demands these industries and employees put on infrastructure. The problem, from purely an environmental health standpoint, is most acute in water delivery and waste-water treatment systems.

Some maquiladoras consume huge amounts of water; in Tijuana, a Samsung electronics manufacturing plant is estimated to use up to 1 million gallons a day--nearly 5% of the city’s total water consumption. In April 1995, Juan Alvarez, a researcher at the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California, reported that industrial water consumption in Tijuana increased from an estimated 106,350 gallons per day in 1987 to 4.1 million gallons per day in 1994. He attributed this change to the tremendous increase of maquiladoras and associated employee households.

Meanwhile, 15% of Tijuana’s households are not connected to the city’s water delivery system; many more are without sewerage hookups.

Alvarez calculated that, at 1994 projected growth rates, Tijuana may experience a water deficit by 1997.

Waste-water disposal systems, often designed to treat only residential wastes, bear a heavy and potentially hazardous burden from maquiladoras. These industries typically involve metal plating and electronic manufacturing operations, and utilize toxics and heavy metals such as arsenic and lead. In Tijuana, which lacks any industrial pretreatment program, factories discharge these wastes into the overburdened sewage systems where they mix with residential wastes. These aguas negras are discharged directly onto a beach south of Tijuana after receiving low levels of treatment that do little to remove industrial toxics. When the “black waters” overflow the collection system altogether, they wind up in the Tijuana River watershed and, ultimately, on California’s beaches. Even worse, some enterprising farmers siphon off the waste water from the open conveyance canal before it gets to the treatment plant and use it on their crops.

Unfortunately, these grim reports rarely make the news. Rather, the focus is on expanding the maquiladora industry, with little analysis of the water-intensive and highly polluting operations. Some proponents of the North American Free Trade Agreement had predicted the spread of maquiladoras to the jobs-poor interior of Mexico, but the decline in the peso’s value has been a deterrent to foreign investment on that scale. The border area will remain the prime site for maquiladoras.

The migration of Mexican citizens northward, as well as related environmental problems, will continue so long as the maquiladora growth patterns remain unchanged. If the governments of Mexico and the United States truly wanted to reduce the number of immigrants entering this country illegally as well as the related adverse environmental impacts, they could do three things. First, enforce existing Mexican environmental laws regarding discharge of industrial wastes. Second, encourage foreign owners of maquiladoras to invest in the infrastructure in southern Mexico, where workers, given the opportunity, would prefer to stay with their families. Finally, develop funding programs to improve the infrastructure along the border.

But for now, the focus remains on the symptoms (illegal immigrants, pollution at the border) and not the causes (maquiladoras as economic magnets). And until that changes, even Operation Gatekeeper is doomed to fail, overrun by the economic realities of millions of Mexican workers.