Philip Skinner: My community would be a ghost town if the border were closed
COLUMBUS, N.M. – For the past week, President Donald Trump has said he would close the southern border if Mexico did not stop drugs and migrants from coming into the United States. On Thursday, he issued a “one-year warning.” If he does eventually carry out his threat, the whole country would feel the impact in some way. But in my small town, ordinary life would stop in its tracks.
About 1,700 people live here, and we share a border with – and depend on – the town of Palomas, in Chihuahua state, Mexico. In our elementary school, two-thirds of the students are U.S. citizens who live with their families in Mexico.
We’re not the only community where this occurs. In places like El Paso and Juarez or San Diego and Tijuana or Calexico and Mexicali, hundreds of children cross the border twice each day to attend class in the United States. Usually, those schools are private or if they’re public, choose not to ask questions when students claim to reside with a nearby relative. They operate in a gray zone, where the boundaries are blurred.
We may be unique in that sense: Our schools don’t just open their doors to students from Mexico. We send a small fleet, 12 yellow buses strong, to fetch them, taking some 400 elementary school students to Columbus and another 400 middle and high schoolers to nearby Deming. Every weekday morning, at 7:20 a.m., I jump in my bus to drive to the port of entry, which sits within the village limits, to pick up the 71 elementary school students assigned to my route. On the opposite side of the bollard fence, they wave goodbye to their parents – many of whom aren’t authorized to enter the United States – and present their passports and plastic-sleeved birth certificates to Customs and Border Patrol. They have their backpacks and lunchboxes inspected, pass through the inspection area and walk to the buses, parked five minutes away. In the afternoons, around 2:30 p.m., it all happens in reverse.
This arrangement has been in place for generations. Though New Mexico uses a formula whereby school districts aren’t funded by local property taxes, there have always been a few residents who complain that Mexican families aren’t contributing funds to the system and ought to pay tuition. For the most part, though, people here agree that since these children are American, and the majority of them will eventually live and work in this country, it’s better for everyone that they get an education and are better prepared to contribute to society.
Since I moved here three decades ago, my livelihood has depended on crossing the border. For 25 years, I owned a business manufacturing furniture in Mexico and shipping it back into the United States, to stores around the country. After that business succumbed to the recession in 2012, my wife and I bought a six-room inn. Today, we offer tours of the various ruins and historic sites of northern Chihuahua and shuttle guests to pharmacies and medical services in Palomas. It’s so commonplace for people to come to this area for their health needs that I partnered with Angeles Dental Clinic, a family dental practice in Mexico, so we could offer lodging, an appointment and a free ride as a package deal.
I’m a lifelong Republican. I don’t believe in open borders. I don’t think it’s acceptable for people to flee lawlessness in their home countries and then break our laws to come to the United States. But as someone who has built a life in this porous place, who loves living in an area with two cultures and easy movement, I don’t see the dangers at the border that Trump’s speeches describe. No one wants criminals to come here, of course, but families seeking safety and individuals seeking work don’t pose a threat to public safety.
We do have a problem at the border: Our government doesn’t seem to be working as efficiently as it could to process asylum cases. Mexico also needs to do its part to regulate the flow of migrants. But this is not a national emergency, and it doesn’t exert the same pressures at all the crossing points. The problem wouldn’t be solved by shutting down the border and hurting the people who live here.
Earlier this week, the president seemed to shrug off the potential fallout: “Sure it’s going to have a negative impact on the economy,” Trump said. “Security is more important to me than trade.” On the face of it, that seems reasonable. In practice, the potential harm outweighs any possible security benefit. Closing the border would devastate industries from auto manufacturing – in U.S.-made cars, 37% of imported parts come from Mexico – to agriculture, including the corn, soybean, dairy and pork farmers who depend on getting their goods to Mexican markets quickly. It would also hit the energy sector, since Mexico is the largest buyer of our refined fuels, and the tourism sector, since Mexicans account for nearly 1 in 4 travelers to the United States, and spend about $19 billion a year here. Some officials said they would contain the damage by allowing freight passage through - but that doesn’t help all of us who depend on pedestrian and vehicular traffic, whose livelihoods operate outside of those big supply chains.
Our economies are so interdependent that it’s impossible to prepare. While it’s hard to imagine the border being shut down for very long, I was also surprised by how long the government shutdown lasted earlier this year. A border closure of any length might put me out of business. Customers would stop coming to my hotel – some tourists have told me they worried about getting stranded in Mexico – and there’d be no need for my bus routes. Our classrooms would sit mostly empty. By cutting off our neighbors, we would only hurt ourselves.
As told to Washington Post editor Sophia Nguyen.