Border Trade Boom Gives Rise to New Ports of Entry

Plopped alone in the New Mexico desert, it seems an odd beginning for a new community--like a front door awaiting the rest of the house.

Yet this tiny border crossing, which opened permanently two years ago in a plain of yucca and wild rabbits, is at the heart of a lofty vision to create, from scratch, twin cities on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

If the designs of developers in both countries pan out, nearly 500,000 people will someday inhabit a new cross-border community of houses, shopping centers and industrial parks--all built around the promise of international trade through the new port of entry, which sits a winding, 25-minute drive from downtown El Paso.

The plans are perhaps the most dramatic example of efforts by communities across the U.S.-Mexico border to hitch economic development to new or expanded ports of entry at a time of exploding binational trade under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Across the Southwest, at least 10 sites are being looked at for possible new ports for purposes ranging from easing truck congestion along busy trade routes to boosting cross-border tourism and shopping.

In Texas, two new international bridges opened this year and another is to open next year. A few others have received approval or are being reviewed by federal officials in Washington and Mexico City. More modest proposals are also being pitched or examined in San Diego and Jacumba in California and San Luis, Ariz.

The pressure to punch new openings in the border comes as the U.S. government has bolstered barriers against illegal entry and drug trafficking along the frontier. In Jacumba, a remote eastern San Diego County town being studied for a possible port, the Border Patrol finished putting up a 10-foot steel border fence three years ago.

The new and proposed ports are in large part a response to the rising flood of freight trucks shuttling goods--such as computer chips to Mexico and finished electronics back to the United States--that has created maddening backups at key crossing points. In California, $1 billion in border highway building is planned in San Diego and Imperial counties to tie border crossings to existing interstate highways. Texas officials recently unveiled plans to spend $1.2 billion to expand trade highways.

But some border communities see the gateways as a chance to create new businesses or lure existing ones tied to U.S.-Mexico trade, which has increased to $173 billion a year from $81.5 billion since NAFTA went into effect in 1994. The goal is to jump-start economies that often are poor and lacking in promising industry.

“A lot of places on the border see having a bridge as a real moneymaker when they charge a toll, or something to spur economic development,” said a State Department official.

Officials in Yuma County, Ariz., envision a proposed commercial truck port on the site of a longtime cattle crossing in San Luis as a key step in establishing a supply and shipment industry that could capitalize on the production just south of the border of everything from televisions and stereo speakers to patio furniture and jeans--and thereby reduce the Yuma region’s reliance on agriculture.

“What we’re looking for are some good year-round jobs,” said Lucy Shipp, who chairs the Yuma County Board of Supervisors.

Joe Harper, mayor of San Luis, said the port, which will tie into a new four-lane highway, is designed to divert the 300 to 400 trucks that pass daily through the cramped downtown crossing. He said that should spur development on the outskirts of the city, which depends heavily on downtown shoppers from San Luis Rio Colorado in Mexico.

The Santa Teresa, N.M., scheme, first hatched two decades ago by a colorful land trader who went bust and lost most of his stake, has taken more concrete form since trucks began rumbling through the new port on a rural highway.

After years of unmet hopes, more than a dozen factories, warehouses and office buildings have sprouted on the U.S. side. Tractors are chewing through the scrub to make way for more. Construction is nearly done on a crucial 15-mile link between the New Mexico border crossing and Interstate 10, a major U.S. truck corridor.

Mexican developers, who have closely guarded their plans, say they intend to start building houses next spring on nearly 50,000 acres that are now desert shrub. Designs for the settlement, to be called San Jeronimo, are being coordinated with U.S. developers to avoid duplication. A road approved on the Mexican side would connect San Jeronimo with Ciudad Juarez, the industrial hub facing El Paso, and, the hope is, draw a considerable chunk of binational commerce.

“The whole idea is to build a place that allows the border economy to grow, but guides it in a way so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past--so it doesn’t look like a border town,” said Mark Lautman, general manager of one of the U.S. development firms.

The port, which opened with temporary quarters in 1993, is a tidy trio of modern buildings sporting a Southwest motif and, on the Mexican side, a new bank. The remote location feels a world removed from unincorporated Santa Teresa--a settlement of 2,200 whose homes ring two golf courses built as part of the original vision.

The nearest Mexican community is a shantytown of factory workers, called Anapra, that represents the spreading western edge of Ciudad Juarez. About 15 miles down the road is the site where U.S. and Mexican authorities recently began digging for the remains of victims of drug traffickers.

New Mexico officials see the new port of entry and the planned border projects as perhaps their sole hope for bringing international trade to the state. New Mexico, which loses out to Texas because it doesn’t manufacture much and lacks major crossings, ranks third from the bottom of all U.S. states in commerce with Mexico.

Planning from the ground up is a novel concept on the border, where, along major stretches of Texas and California, an explosion in the number of Mexican assembly plants known as maquiladoras has created a pell-mell economy and sent truck traffic soaring.

The hurdles facing Santa Teresa and San Jeronimo, from legal spats to questions of water supply, are daunting. Some skeptics see only limited trade profits for border communities over the long run. And other observers note a paradox: Border communities are acting in response to a free-trade trend that could someday render the border irrelevant. James Giermanski, a border trade specialist at Texas A&M; International University in Laredo, said the two nations already have enough border crossings. The solution to congestion, he said, is longer operating hours and more efficient use of existing ports.

It can take years to prepare studies needed to apply for a new port of entry and longer still to gain required approval from a range of agencies, such as customs and immigration, within both federal governments. It often takes persuasion to get truckers to use new crossings. Trucks going through Santa Teresa still are barely a trickle--just 150 a day.

On the U.S. side is a traditional tension between communities’ desire for entry ports and the expense of supplying inspectors to block smuggling of illegal immigrants and drugs.

Customs officials say they are happy to back new crossings--if needed to accommodate additional cars and trucks. They argue that smaller new crossings don’t make it easier to smuggle drugs, but cost extra for enforcement because they require inspectors to do some of the work that giant X-ray machines now do at the border’s half-dozen largest crossings.

Local officials along the border fear being left out of a global economy based increasingly on hurry-up shipping. Along the Texas segment of the border, privately owned bridge crossings generate tolls, making them coveted revenue sources in both countries. Elsewhere the gains are measured in new jobs and industries.

“It’s not one of those, ‘If you build it they will come,’ ” said Shipp of Yuma County. “This is one of those, ‘They’re coming, we better get it built.’ ”

Even if Mexico someday goes through with plans to scrap tax breaks that have lured so many maquiladoras south of the border, experts believe the free-trade accord will have a far broader, and lasting, impact.

In Imperial County, where a truck crossing opened between Calexico and Mexicali three years ago, farmland is being turned into a series of industrial parks on 1,500 acres just across the border from about 170 maquiladoras. Imperial County is overseeing construction of new sewer and water systems, and Caltrans is working to complete a new expressway on the California side.

The Calexico development “is intended to be the mirror side of what’s happening in the Mexicali Valley area in terms of the maquiladoras,” said Imperial County planning director Jurg Heuberger. “What we need on this side is distribution, warehouses, offices--the kinds of things you need for import-export.”

The tidal wave of truck traffic caught many border communities unprepared. Many of the nation’s 45 or so port of entry facilities are old, dating 50 years or more, and hemmed in by subsequent building. Spotty planning hasn’t helped. The new Calexico port was welcome relief, but the road north went nowhere, forcing trucks back into downtown.

Aggravating congestion, lines of exhaust-spewing trucks have no choice but to pass through ports built in downtown centers. That’s not the case in San Diego, where commercial trucks must cross at Otay Mesa, about six miles east of the San Ysidro port of entry. But even on the best days, the backup spills onto city streets in Tijuana’s industrial zone.

Now planners are proposing a second Otay Mesa crossing to tie in with roads on the U.S. side and a Mexican loop, called Tijuana 2000, around central Tijuana to Rosarito.

The Otay Mesa crossing was conceived in the 1970s. By the time it became San Diego’s sole truck port in 1994, however, the Baja California maquiladora industry had taken off, growing to nearly 1,000 plants, and NAFTA was taking effect.

Since NAFTA, the number of trucks passing through California’s three commercial ports has swelled to nearly 2 million from 886,000 in 1993. The result is chronic congestion. Caltrans just finished expanding the border road serving Otay Mesa to six lanes and plans an adjacent freeway.

The rush reflects keen competition among U.S. border states for federal highway funds newly earmarked for border projects. The program provides $700 million over five years to build or improve roads and trade corridors served by border crossings.

But funding in Mexico is in too short supply to match the U.S. wave of construction.

“We have a wave of studies--for later building,” quipped Leonora Rueda Gutierrez, director of border affairs at the Mexico’s Foreign Ministry. “Mexico doesn’t have the resources the United States does.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Border Trade

Trade between the United States and Mexico has doubled since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994, pushing up border traffic and encouraging communities to get in on the action.

* Sources: U.S. Customs, Arizona Department of Commerce, California Trade and Commerce Agency, New Mexico Economic Development Department, Texas Department of Economic Development

Border Crossing Boom

Booming trade is boosting truck traffic across the U.S.-Mexico border, prompting communities to promote new or expanded ports of entry. New crossings are billed as engines of economic development and as relief for port congestion in places such as San Diego, El Paso and Laredo.