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Sheer economic interdependence is, of course, the main tie that binds the people living on opposite sides of the border. Mexicans cross the checkpoints, often daily, because there are more jobs and higher pay in the U.S. Merchants on the American side depend heavily on sales to Mexicans, who often find items of greater variety and higher quality than in their home cities. Lately, the strong U.S. dollar and the devalued peso have sharply cut Mexican buying power and caused havoc for some U.S. border businesses. Many American shoppers in turn have been flooding into Mexico in search of bargains.
The mutual reliance has grown spectacularly in recent years with the increase in maquiladoras, so-called twin plants on the Mexican side of the border. These are creations of U.S. companies, which set up factories to take advantage of cheap and once abundant labor to turn out products, ranging from computers to jump ropes, that are shipped back into the U.S. Both nations have reduced various export and import fees to aid this development. There are now some 700 such plants, providing Mexico with about $l.3 billion in earnings annually and a foreign exchange income exceeded only by its oil exports.
The presence of the maquiladoras benefits communities on both sides. El Paso Mayor Jonathan Rogers figures his city would lose 20,000 jobs if the twin plants in Juarez closed. This would double El Paso's already high unemployment rate to 24%. In Juarez, Mayor Barrio says any such shutdown would cause his city's economy to "immediately collapse."
One exception to the general harmony along the border is the friction between Tijuana (pop. 566,000), a former honky-tonk town that has made impressive progress in modernizing its business section, and San Diego (pop. 2 million), an adjacent Sunbelt city with many military personnel, both active and retired, and relatively few Hispanic residents. The canyons and ravines on the south side of San Diego have become a no-man's-land, where Mexican bandits, many of them drug addicts, prey on their countrymen crossing the border illegally. U.S. Border Patrol agents and San Diego police trying to control this violence have run into Mexican police in the canyons who, they suspect, have participated in the robberies. On at least two occasions the officers from the two nations have shot at each other. Tensions increased last April after two U.S. Border Patrol agents seized a 15-year-old Mexican for illegally entering the U.S. through a hole in a fence. The youth's twelve- year-old brother lobbed rocks over the fence at the officers. When he stooped to pick up another rock, one of the officers shot him in the back, seriously wounding him. More ill feeling was generated when Tijuana's aging and overloaded sewage system developed leaks, sending raw effluent into the Pacific and polluting San Diego's beaches.