The Fiscal Cost of Protecting the Border

As Chapters 10 and 13 discuss, the US has spent literally billions of dollars protecting the US border. On the southern US border, we witnessed several different variations of the ‘fence’, which are pictured below.  Some of them are very tall and nearly impassible (which are located near large urban centers), while others (in more remote areas) represent only a marker of the border and would be extremely easy to cross.  Our ride-along with the US Border Patrol highlighted how the fence is mostly symbolic- that if people (migrants, drug smugglers, human traffickers) really want to get across it, they can.  In fact, we saw a section of the fence that was cut and then patched up by border patrol, indicating just how easy it is to get through much of the fencing.  However, technology is doing most of the work in protecting the US-Mexico border.  The Department of Homeland Security is employing video surveillance, drones, and motion sensors as their primary line of defense, along with 21,000 border patrol agents in 2014 (up from 4,000 in 1992, according to the US Customs and Border Protection website). The cost of this protection is $3.6 billion in recent years.  The technology exists along the border, but also in the interior with border checkpoints sometimes several miles away from the actual border.  A recent book entitled Border Patrol Nation  by Todd Miller discusses recent trends in border militarization. 

Border Economies

In our trip to the US-Mexico border, we spent four days in El Paso, Texas and Cuidad Juárez, Mexico. Effectively, El Paso and Juárez constitute one large city split by the border fence, where people move between the two cities going about their daily lives.  Many people live on one side of the border and (legally) work on the other side.  Families are spread across the two cities (and hence the two countries). Mexicans living in Juárez regularly come to El Paso to shop.  Dollars are widely accepted in Juárez, and both cities are bilingual.  There are several bridges in which people can walk across to the other country (but still have to go through border security).  Border patrol is present throughout both cities.   The El Paso-Juárez sector epitomizes a border economy, with goods, services and people flowing across the border each direction throughout the day. On our drive through Juárez, we saw literally dozens of maquiladoras (often referred to as maquilas) –  huge manufacturing plants set up by US corporations (Boeing, Lexmark, and Electrolux to name a few) to take advantage of lower wages in Mexico (maquilas became prevalent as the result of North American Free Trade Agreement established in 1992).   As Chapter 9 discusses, immigration between countries can have important impacts on international trade, product diversity, and the price of goods and services in each country.  This is exactly the case in El Paso and Juárez.