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It is often said the border is its own country, "Amexica," neither Mexican nor American. "The border is not where the U.S. stops and Mexico begins," says Laredo mayor Betty Flores. "It's where the U.S. blends into Mexico." Both sides regard their sovereign governments as distant and dysfunctional. They are proud of their ability to take care of themselves, solve their problems faster and cheaper than any faraway bureaucrat. The Brownsville, Texas, fire trucks answer sirens on the other side; in Tijuana, Mexico, health clinics send shuttle buses every morning to meet people coming over for everything from dentistry to dialysis. The school district in Mission, Texas, among the state's poorest, sends its old furniture over the border to help Mexican schools that are lucky to have a roof, much less desks and chairs. El Paso is redesigning the kilns of Juarez brickmakers to cut the soot from burning old tires; the twin cities have signed more treaties than their national governments can keep track of, let alone ratify. "The only way the cities in this region can make it," says Juarez mayor Gustavo Elizondo, "is to forget that a line and a river exist here."
Yet for all the frontier pioneer spirit, local leaders do draw a line. Why should the whole country benefit from the blessings of free trade if the border region pays the price? To enforce immigration policies over which they have no control, border counties lay out $108 million a year in law enforcement and medical expenses associated with illegal crossings, money most of these poor counties can't afford. Yes, there is a shortage of truck drivers, but there is also a shortage of judges to hear all the drug and smuggling cases. Arizona ambulance companies face bankruptcy because of all the unreimbursed costs of rescuing illegals from the desert. Schools everywhere here are poor, overcrowded and growing. Truck traffic is good for your business but bad for your health; many border cities routinely fail to meet federal air-quality standards. Border agents get sick from standing on the bridges and inhaling diesel exhaust all day.
Good health care has always been scarce here, but the border boom makes it worse. A third of all U.S. tuberculosis cases are concentrated in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. In the El Paso hospitals, 50% of the patients are on some kind of public assistance, mainly Medicaid. Just about the only patients paying full freight, up front, are rich Mexicans who cross over to see a specialist. "Border towns have a double burden of disease," says Russell Bennett, chief of the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission, "those of emerging nations, like diarrhea, as well as [First World] diseases like stress and diabetes."
The poor on both sides are united by a struggle just to survive what most Americans can barely imagine. Mothers in the rural El Paso outpost of Revolucion cross into Juarez to buy methyl parathion, a pesticide so lethal it is banned in the U.S. They sprinkle it around their shanties, and it kills the roaches and tarantulas for a year. But their children play in the dust and dirt, and when they get sick, their parents take them to Juarez doctors, who are cheaper and stay open into the night. If the children die, they are buried across the border; there it costs about $150 instead of the $2,000 for an American grave.