Panel Preview: Growing Together: How a 21st Century Border is Essential to Prosperity in Both the U.S. and Mexico

NDN will be hosting an event on April 11th which will be examining the relationship between the United States and Latin America.  The day will be divided in half with the morning focusing on Latin America exclusively and the afternoon on the 21st Century Border Initiative.

Our final panel of the day, Growing Together: How a 21st Century Border is Essential to Prosperity in Both the U.S. and Mexico will be moderated by Maria Luisa O’Connell, Senior Advisor for Trade and Public Relations Office of the Commissioner US Customs and Border Protection, DHS, with a distinguished group of panelists, Martin Rojas, Vice President of Security & Operations, American Trucking Association, Jim Kolbe, Senior Transatlantic Fellow, The German Marshall Fund and Col. Eric Rojo, Vice President of U.S.-Mexico Chamber Of Commerce and Security Program Coordinator for CEDAN-ITESM.

The panel will focus on infrastructure and the economic impact of the border on the economy of the United States and Mexico. In particular the panel will give a macro and micro look at  the United States Mexico economic ties along the border. With the government providing unprecedented resources along the border, questions about how best to utilize these funds have been discussed in a recent Congressional hearing.

Tuesday the Subcommittee On Border and Maritime Security held a hearing “Using Resources Effectively to Secure Our Border at Ports of Entry – Stopping the Illicit Flow of Money, Guns and Drugs”.

During the hearing the Mayor of McAllen Texas, Richard Cortez testified, that the border has been given incredible amounts of resources.  The border is getting safer but more then anything else what is needed are funds to staff ports of entry in order to better facilitate the movement of goods from the United States into and out of Mexico:

We have an imbalance of investment and results on the border. Since 1993, we have increased our investment 800 percent in Border Patrol personnel, mobility, communications and technology. That effort between the ports has been successful; the Border Patrol intercepts 70 percent of lawbreakers across the border; in the El Paso sector, the success rate is 90 percent.

Mayor Cortez noted that the legal movement of goods thru those ports is an incredibly positive economic benefit for his city:

Secure and efficient ports of entry are very important to cities like McAllen. They create jobs, sustain our economy and improve our quality of life. They expedite legitimate trade and traffic to flow across our border and in our case, contribute to McAllen’s $3 billion retail industry. Without federal-local coordination, efforts to simultaneously secure ports and make them more efficient will not be possible.

Alan Gomez of USA Today reported in anticipation of the hearing, which can be read in full here, that there has been a huge influx of resources towards securing the border:

From 2006 to 2010, the number of Customs and Border Protection officers who inspect people and cargo crossing through the ports of entry along the southwest border increased by 15%, while the number of CBP Border Patrol agents who patrol the rugged terrain between those ports increased by 59%, according to CBP figures.

Essentially, the resources being allocated at the border are having a positive effect, making the border safer. Now the question is as the region grows safer how best to harness the positive economic relationship between the United States and Mexico. For more on this disucssion, please make sure to join us at our event on April 11th.