ABQJOURNAL OPINION/GUEST_COLUMNS: State Doesn't Understand Potential of Border

Sunday, March 06, 2011

State Doesn't Understand Potential of Border

By Javier Ortiz
El Paso Border Analyst
          A view of Ciudad Juárez/El Paso and Ciudad Juárez/Southern New Mexico through Google Earth shows the marked difference in industrial activity between Texas and Chihuahua and that between New Mexico and Chihuahua.
        The Ciudad Juárez/El Paso image is cluttered with industrial buildings, roads and border crossings. The one between Ciudad Juárez and Southern New Mexico depicts a desert spotted with a few industrial buildings in Santa Teresa and the huge Foxconn industrial complex in San Jerónimo on the Mexico side of the border.
        Those images show the stark comparison hidden in the numbers for the region's Gross State Product and Gross Metro Product:
        • New Mexico GSP: $74.8 billion
        • Albuquerque GMP: $35.5 billion
        • Las Cruces GMP: $5.4 billion
        • El Paso GMP: $26.6 billion
        • Ciudad Juárez GMP: $34.8 billion
        (Sources: US Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Instituto Mexicano Para la Competitividad)
        And, in exports:
        • New Mexico: $ 2.8 billion
        • Albuquerque: $475 million
        • Las Cruces: $527 million
        • El Paso: $ 9.4 billion
        • Ciudad Juárez: $21.3 billion
        (Sources: US Dept. of Commerce International Trade Administration, INEGI)
        Ciudad Juárez is highly diversified and its potential resides in 332 industrial plants. In New Mexico, more than 50 percent of industrial export production resides in fewer than 10 plants.
        Why the great variance in international trade at neighboring areas of the same geographic location?
        Because as a binational region supplying manufacturing services to the world we are like a three bedroom house in which two of the bedrooms are full and one is empty.
        Juárez and El Paso are rooms bursting open at the seams, Southern New Mexico is the empty room in the house.
        Not even the tragic course of events affecting Ciudad Juárez for the last three years, nor the global economic downturn have significantly diminished its industrial potential.
        Together we constitute a transborder region with a strong, clean industry vocation and as such we compete with other regions of the world for investment, jobs, industrial production and the higher standard of living associated to them.
        We are born partners where México provides the highly competitive skills and affordable costs for high quality industrial production and the United States provides the logistics, warehousing, transportation, communications, financing and stable economic environment.
        We are a team. And our territory is comprised by southern New Mexico — Doña Ana County, Las, Cruces, Sunland Park, Santa Teresa — El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.
        We are indeed a three-bedroom house of wealth-creating potential.
        We successfully compete against Asia, the European Union, Central America. Globally, we not only compete against them, we are the best partners they can find to advantageously enter the biggest market in the world: the U.S. market.
        Within this reality, New Mexico presently battles with the idea of pulling back on its institutional effort to develop strategic infrastructure on the border by diminishing the footprint of the New Mexico Border Authority.
        This in a political environment in which New Mexico acquired the benefit of a governor who carries in her professional genes the absolute understanding of the potential of New Mexico's southern border.
        This fortunate political event would be greatly enhanced if the New Mexico Legislature would look south, put aside its historical apprehensions, seek bipartisan common ground and decidedly march hand in hand with the executive and with the people of New Mexico into the great opportunity offered by its international border.
        A New Mexico Border Authority, designed along the lines of a typical maritime port authority — with powers to finance, design, build, operate and manage — constitutes the correct tool to facilitate and build in speedy and focused fashion the border urban and industrial infrastructure to secure the participation of the global private sector in the well-being of New Mexicans through the industrial development of its international border area.
        A united, intelligent effort to provide New Mexico its proper place in the world.
        To put that empty room to good use.

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