Everything’s fine at the most open border in US

The border between the US and Mexico is located in a large room. From the Mexican side, you get there by walking through a series of hallways. You may also take some elevators. It’s clean, quiet and orderly — more DMV than Versailles.
This description may not comport with the images of the border you may have seen on television. Those images are not false. There are certain points along the border that are magnets for misery, from one side, and demagogy from the other. Television cameras and journalists congregate in those places alongside foreign migrants desperate for relief and American senators and representatives hungry for publicity.
Yet my description of the border is nonetheless accurate. I have walked the border’s hallways and ridden its elevators. Earlier this month I flew from La Paz, on the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, to Tijuana. Then I walked from the airport in Mexico across to the US. I was accompanied through this Cross Border Express, as it’s called, by Americans, Mexicans and a rolling battalion of luggage. By the time I was outside in the warm and open air, I had the keys to my rental car in hand and was heading for San Diego. The border, back inside the terminal, was already behind me.
No portion of the US border is “open.” To get from Tijuana to San Diego you need government authorisation of one form or another. Along America’s extensive, highly militarised Southwestern land border, the US Border Patrol intercepted more than 1.7 million undocumented migrants in the fiscal year that ended in October. Because a Covid-related policy named Title 42 enables essentially instant deportation, perhaps as many as one in four of those turned back were migrants who had tried to enter the US multiple times.
In a logical inversion that reflects how dishonest debate can get, large numbers of arrests and deportations are cited as evidence that the border is “open.” Likewise, border seizures of large quantities of northbound drugs are noted as further proof that the border is porous. It’s akin to pointing to the US’s large prison population as evidence that crime in the US goes unpunished. Vast political energy goes into turning reason upside down.
Yet if you were a politician interested in showcasing a relatively open border, instead of a politician intent on manufacturing and exploiting fear, you might come to the imaginary line separating Tijuana, Mexico, from San Ysidro, California. It’s the busiest land-border crossing in the Western Hemisphere, and local officials on both sides are constantly scheming to ease the flow of goods and people in both directions.
In August alone, before border restrictions on nonessential travel were lifted for vaccinated foreigners on November 8, more than 2 million vehicle passengers travelled from Mexico across the San Ysidro port of entry. In other words, at just this one port of entry, more people lawfully drove automobiles from Mexico to the US than were intercepted along
the border in an entire year of record apprehensions. Nearly half a million more pedestrians walked north across the border at San Ysidro. That sounds a little open border-y doesn’t it? And that’s not counting the commercial trucks that cross at a nearby port of entry, Otay Mesa.
“For people like me,” said Kenia Zamarippa, executive director of international business affairs for the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, “the border’s a blur. I’ve been crossing the border for work since I was 19.” Zamarippa is a live action model of a region that proudly, publicly declares itself “binational.” A citizen of both Mexico and the US, Zamarippa was born in the US and educated in Mexico — including college at a university that’s now accredited in the US. She works in San Diego while living in Tijuana, where housing, as many American retirees will attest, is cheaper.
Many of her friends from Tijuana, she said, began routine border crossing even before she did — attending school in California while living in Tijuana.
Cross-border integration here is both a long-term ideal and a contemporary norm. More than 100,000 commuters cross the border at San Ysidro each day. Business and political leaders in Southern California speak of a place they call “CaliBaja,” and often present a binational public face. As Jerry Sanders, who was a Republican mayor of San Diego as well as its chief of police and is now president and CEO of the San Diego Regional Chamber, told a business journal in 2018, “We work more closely with the governor of Baja than we do with the governor of California. Our economies are so intertwined that you can’t separate them. Every new job in Baja creates half a job in San Diego.”
At the Otay Mesa border crossing, some products cross back and forth between the two countries multiple times, acquiring “inputs and raw materials” on both sides of the border before being finished and shipped. Among the San Diego Regional Chamber’s 2,500 dues-paying members are businesses located in the Mexican state of Baja. While driving around the acres of warehouses and logistics firms on the US side of the border, I pulled up to a stoplight next to a truck. Its cab listed a San Diego address. Its license plate was from Baja, Mexico.
Undocumented migrants still try to enter the US near San Ysidro. But the bigger challenge is reducing wait times to keep the swelling flow of authorised travel moving in both directions. The San Ysidro Port of Entry recently completed a more than $700-million expansion, which includes more pedestrian space and additional lanes for automobile traffic.

—Bloomberg

Francis Wilkinson writes about US politics and domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously executive editor of the Week, a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist