Net-Zero, A New U.S. Reality

By Victor Landa

Picture this: It’s mid to late February on the border between the U.S. and Mexico. On the U.S. side, in Laredo, Texas, they’re celebrating George Washington’s birthday with a week-long shindig replete with a parade and carnival and street food. On a given day of the festival week the U.S. authorities open the border, literally, to anyone who wants to cross so they can join the festivities, shop and such. Mind you, this was the early 1970’s, and the border was a very different place than it is now.

One of those years, I must have still been in secundaria (middle school), my buddies and I decided it would be an adventure to storm the U.S. along with the rest of the folks on the pasada libre. I’m a U.S. citizen, at the time I was living on the Mexican side of the  border because that was my parent’s choice. My friends were all able to cross the border (they either had crossing cards or were U.S. citizens as well), except for one. So we braved the pasada libre crowd for him.

The U.S. authorities had placed simple wooden barriers across the bridge at the international demarcation line, nothing more elaborate than that. And the people on the Mexican side respected it. When the guys in the blue uniforms moved the barriers out of the way the crowd lunged forward, pushed from behind, flowing into the U.S. and spilling into the Laredo streets with hurried excitement.

There were seven of us and the rush of the crowd split us into three groups. Somehow we found each other, hours later, but still managed to make a day of it. Here’s the thing that I find remarkable about that day: the authorities on the U.S. side took a net-zero crossing for granted. They just assumed that as many people who went into Laredo that morning would return to Nuevo Laredo that evening. And they mostly did, I’m sure.

Fast-forward forty years, past everything that’s happened along the border between the U.S. and Mexico, past the violence and the pollution, the coyotes and the cartels. Stop at the recent Pew Hispanic Center study that claims, with some surprise, that immigration from Mexico has stalled – a net-zero count where as many people from Mexico enter the U.S. as travel south across the border.

It’s not a startling thing to me. I’m a border brat. I grew up straddling the line between two countries, crossing it once in each direction,  once a day, for many years of my life. The fact that people come and go across the U.S.-Mexico border is a fact of life as common to me as grabbing a fork with my left hand – the whole net-zero thing is an interesting statistic, nothing else.

But it matters, in a wider political and social sense, so I’ll take them into account. People don’t cross the border on a whim. They do it for specific reasons. Scientists like to label things, it keeps their thoughts and processes orderly, so they call those border crossing reasons “push/pull” factors: specifically jobs, commerce, tourism.  It’s a simple equation: if there are no jobs on one side of the border, and there are many jobs on the other, people will go where the jobs are. There is no one, anywhere, who doesn’t respond to that push/pull factor.

So something’s gone awry in that equation along the southern border (or northern border, depending on where you stand). The Pew researchers say it’s a combination of things.

 The standstill appears to result from the weakened U.S. job market, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings, and changing economic and demographic conditions in Mexico.

In other words, the border isn’t what it used to be and things up the road from it have changed as well. Why cross the border if it’s more dangerous to do so, if it costs more to get across, if there are fewer jobs once you get where you’re going and if the job market back home is better because there are less people looking for work?

Those of us who live or have lived straddling the border understand it as a delicate balance (we also see it as an inconvenience, but that’s fodder for another day). The slightest change on either side can tip it. Net-zero implies a level circumstance, that things are equal on both sides. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what that means for the U.S. economy.

But for U.S. politics it means a new understanding. It means that all of the bickering and belly-aching about the scourge of  undocumented workers has been uncovered as layers-deep noise and straw man tactics.

The issue is gone and we’re left with the undocumented who are here already. So lets lower the decibel rate and talk about a way to make the situation work (we’re not going to put them in a bus and send them back, it’s irrational to even think about it). And then, lets put our new understanding to use. People move across borders when things are better on one side than they are on the other. We know now through experience what border brats have known all along.

Imagine working with Mexico to change the variables of the push/pull equation instead of building a wall to work against it.

[Photo By dmealiffe]

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