Cross-Border Economic Bulletin - September/October 2002
San Diego - Tijuana: It's Not Texas

A recently published collection of essays on border communities invites the residents of San Diego and Tijuana to reflect on our border and to compare and contrast it to other border regions. Caught in the Middle: Border Communities in the Era of Globalization, edited by Demetrious Papademetriou and Deborah Meyers, and published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2001), is a collection of seven comparative studies of border communities in North America, Europe, Central Asia, and the Russian Far East. What is surprising about this volume is the degree of similarity in the problems faced by "borderlanders" no matter how different they are from one another.

Jim Gerber

Two essays focus on communities along the US-Mexico border; one covers a pair of twin cities on the Texas border (Laredo-Nuevo Laredo and El Paso-Juarez), and one covers both San Diego-Tijuana and the two Nogaleses in Arizona and Sonora. The contrast between the essay on the Texas border, where integration and solidarity are portrayed as a significant part of the social, political, and economic landscape, and the essay covering San Diego-Tijuana relations, could hardly be greater. For the most part, the essays reinforce the stereotypes of border relations in Texas and California as friendly and pro-Mexico in the first case, and if not hostile, at least deeply ignorant, in the second.

This issue of the Cross Border Economic Bulletin analyzes these two essays, concentrating particularly on the contrasting images of the Texas border region and San Diego-Tijuana. Its main findings are:

• Communities in Texas are perceived as having much better cross-border relations than San Diego-Tijuana, or California Baja California;

• Four factors explain the difference between Texas and California: language, culture, governance, and economics;

• Borderlanders can have significant input into the shape of border policies, but the prerequisite for influencing federal policies is a clear vision of what the border should look like.

Texas and California
Stereotypically, California and Texas are portrayed as having nearly opposite relations with Mexico. While governors in Texas have special relationships with Mexico (e.g., Bush's friendship with Fox), and have carefully cultivated business and other ties, public policy in California has sometimes been sidetracked into areas that hurt relations with Mexico and impede cooperation at the border. For example, Proposition 187, denying immigrants the right to education and health care, and Proposition 209, the anti-bilingual education initiative, were both interpreted in many quarters as anti-Mexican. In addition, the tenor of Pete Wilson's successful re-election campaign in the mid-1990s, and the fact that no California governor has made relations with Mexico a top priority, have not helped to counteract the popular image of state policies as, at best, ignorant of Mexico, and at worst, racist.

This is a stereotype, but that does not mean that it has no connection to reality. For example, the essay on Laredo and Nuevo Laredo describes a variety of public and private cross-border collaborations, few of which are happening in the San Diego-Tijuana region. Among the more impressive are joint urban planning (Urban Plan of Los Dos Laredos, 1994), environmental planning (1997), a jointly produced historical guide to the cities, construction of two international bridges across the Rio Grande (San Diegans might think about water aqueducts and airports and wonder how they did it), cross-border training programs for nurses, equipment sharing among hospitals, and a number of other activities in education, business, and public safety. In higher education, the state of Texas offers in-state tuition to Mexican students from border cities who attend the local university in the US. This has been operationalized by universities in Laredo, Brownsville, and El Paso.

What is different about the Texas border?
It is impossible to quantitatively assess the differences between communities in Texas and California in terms of cross-border collaboration, but the evidence points toward less cooperation locally than in other parts of the border. In fact, as the rest of this essay will argue, this is a natural outcome of the differences between San Diego and border communities in Texas, and does not necessarily reflect a backward or hostile attitude towards Tijuana or Mexico.

There are at least four major areas in which Texas border communities are vastly different from San Diego: language, culture, economy, and governance. Census data sheds light on each of these.

Table 1 shows several important demographic characteristics in four US counties. The counties are Imperial and San Diego in California, and Webb (Laredo) and El Paso in Texas. Several patterns stand out. First, the language of the residents of the Texas border is overwhelmingly Spanish. This reduces the cultural distance between Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, for example, and helps eliminate the potentially significant language barrier between the two sides of the border. Second, as judged by language spoken at home, San Diego is much more diverse than the Texas border, where 99.3% (Laredo) and 97.9% of the population speak English or Spanish. In San Diego, by contrast, just over 10% of the population speak neither English nor Spanish at home. Third, and related to the second point, San Diego is less Hispanic than the Texas border, (although Imperial County is not). If ethnicity can serve as a proxy for culture, then one simple yet robust interpretation of the figures in Table 1 is that the barriers to cross border cooperation posed by language and cultural differences are much greater in the San Diego region.

The essay on San Diego-Tijuana in Caught in the Middle repeatedly stresses the complexity and difficulty of public sector cooperation when there is a constant turnover in government leadership. This is a problem in the US, but it is particularly a problem in Mexico, where mayors and their staff are limited to one term. In addition, many jobs that are civil service in US, are patronage jobs in Mexico, so that when a mayor leaves office, more of the city's staff goes with him or her. However, this is a problem everywhere along the border, not just in Tijuana.

Still, the issue of governance is very real, and differences between San Diego and Texas counties are part of the explanation. Specifically, governance is a more complex set of institutions in San Diego County. Table 2 shows the number of distinct, independent, local governments in the four counties. These include all county and sub-county governments with independent decision-making authority, and are comprised of the county, cities, special districts, and school districts. Special districts do not exist in Mexico, and although some have no bearing whatsoever on local cross-border relations, many of them do. Specifically, these would include water districts, hospital districts, irrigation districts, air quality districts, the port authority, and so on. In addition, most counties in the US have a number of distinct school districts which are independent of city and county control.

Population size is probably correlated with the number of governments in the geographical space of a US county, but population does not explain the difference between, say, Imperial County which has about 50% more governments than El Paso, but is only 20% of its population. More governments make cross-border relations more complex to manage because there are more individuals and more unique, single purpose, interest groups likely to be involved in any discussion. Hence, governance issues in the California-Baja California region are complex partly because Californians speak with so many voices that it may not always be clear where jurisdictional boundaries are located, what government represents the interested parties, or what the "San Diego" position is.

Finally, in addition to culture, language, and governance, the Texas border with Mexico differs from the California border and especially San Diego, in its economic distance from Mexico. According to the Census Bureau, the three poorest metropolitan areas in the US are on the Texas border with Mexico, and one is Laredo (#3). El Paso is the 7th poorest city in the US (6 of the 7 poorest are border cities). Table 3 shows estimates of gross regional product per capita for the four US counties and their cross-border counterparts. The Mexican data is converted to dollars using market exchange rates.

The essays in the Caught in the Middle volume describe complications in cross-border relations which are caused by the "asymmetry" in the twin cities. The term is never defined precisely, but it is almost always used in a political sense to imply that US interests are more powerful than Mexican interests. Clearly, however, economic asymmetry is a fundamental reason behind the asymmetry in power. US cities in general are richer than their Mexican twins, but the "asymmetry" in Texas is much less than it is in San Diego.

Greater cross-border income differences in the San Diego-Tijuana region adds a complicating factor to the local engagement in cross-border issues, and there are many reason for this. While space does not permit an extended discussion of the issues, there is one difference that it is easy to spot: the Texas border economy is more dependent on Mexican shoppers and US-Mexico trade flows (truckers, brokers, warehouses, etc.). Consequently, as part of its overall economic development strategy, the state of Texas has been relatively more careful to cultivate close relations with Mexico, and to ensure that a relatively large share of total US-Mexico trade flows through its border communities.

Caught in the middle
Border communities are caught between their roles as "zones of exclusion" and their need to be "zones of integration." This makes cross-border collaboration complicated most of the time, and impossible sometimes. Nevertheless, the collection of essays included in Caught in the Middle makes one point clear: no matter what cultural or economic distance lies between communities on opposite sides of an international border, and no matter how centralized policy may be in a distant national capitol, local residents can have a significant role in shaping border enforcement policies. The main requirement, however, is that border residents must know what they want. More than anything else, the differences between San Diego and Tijuana may keep us from a common vision and, as a result, undermine our ability to negotiate with DC and DF.

The Cross-Border Economic Bulletin is prepared monthly by Dr. Jim Gerber, professor of economics at San Diego State University. It is underwritten by