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America's 4,000-mile border with Canada is basically defended by a couple of fire trucks, and most Americans think that's about all they need. The southern border is half as long, has the equivalent of an army division patrolling it, and many Americans say it should be buttoned down even tighter. At the beginning of a new century, there may be no country on earth with as much potential as Mexico to destabilize the U.S.--and to preserve its standard of living. No wonder people can't decide how much the border should be a barrier, how much a bridge.
From the moment you set foot in the boomtowns of the Rio Grande Valley, you sense you are watching a gold rush, headlong and free spirited and corrupt and ingenious. Stand on a corner some morning in Laredo, Texas, and watch the first of 8,000 trucks a day hauling the global economy north and south, 18-wheelers full of bulldozer claws and baby cribs, all passing through a town that once didn't bother to pave the streets. Now it can't pour concrete fast enough. The banks are open 7 to 7, seven days a week; the pager shops are everywhere. All the roads are being widened, their shoulders littered with pieces of blown-out tires. Locals say you are not really a borderlander until your windshield has been broken at least once, by one of the rocks flying out from under the big rigs.
Much of the border is still desperately poor. McAllen, Texas, at the heart of the fourth fastest-growing metro area in the U.S., is America's poorest city, the Commerce Department announced last month, with an average per capita income of $13,339 a year. But people on both sides are helping one another do the deals, cut the corners, take a region that was forever left behind and turn it into the New Frontier. The NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) prospectors saw in the opening of the border a chance to make a killing by taking factories that would otherwise head to Malaysia and plunking them down right across the border, where the average Mexican worker earns slightly more in a day than an American makes in an hour and where the highways run all the way to Canada.
That means that both countries are growing more dependent on this relationship every day. Mexicans all across the interior follow the North Star chasing the jobs. There are now four or five cities the size of Cleveland, Ohio, sitting right next door, and 25 years from now as much as 40% of the entire Mexican population may be living on the border. The region is Mexico's economic engine, a huge commercial classroom where the unskilled workers who were making gauze eye patches in 1980 now make ATMs and modems and the most popular Sony color TV sold in the U.S.
As for the U.S., it imports not just the gizmos and gadgets but also a way of life, thanks to a shadow labor force that lets Americans eat out once a week because restaurants can hire dishwashers for sub-minimum wage. The U.S. depends on the maids and gardeners and carpenters and home-health-care workers whose children will probably become teachers and technicians and surgeons and Senators. If they all put down their tools tomorrow, the U.S. wouldn't be arguing about whether it is in a recession.