San Diego-Tijuana border

The border between the United States and Mexico represents the sharpest divide in average income of any place on earth! About 85 percent of all people who immigrate to the United States do so legally. About 33 percent of the immigrants are citizens, and 50 percent are legal permanent residents. Only a small minority of immigrants cross the border illegally; 60 percent enter with visas and become "illegal" when they overstay their visas. Most illegal immigrants are Asians and Europeans, not Mexicans. [Source: Bart Laws, "The Immigrant Wars," Z Magazine, November 1996, pp. 31-39.] Since 1995, the U.S. government has spent over 200 percent more on border enforcement while the estimated number of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. has increased by 57 percent! The presence of the U.S. international border creates illegal immigrants. People within Mexico move around the country and especially to large urban centers and to the USA border for jobs and a better standard of living. This is called internal migration. But when they continue this process across the USA border without "proper" papers, they become illegals. Ironically, almost all the illegals seek jobs in the former Mexican territory (US-Mexican War, 1846-1848), which are now called California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. The San Diego-Tijuana border crossing is the busiest in the world. In 1997, 56 million people and nearly 1 million trucks crossed into San Diego from Mexico (the southbound traffic is not counted). Examine border issues in San Diego. Look at this portion of the border in March 2005. Also read about the distinctive features along this border landscape.

Tourists and visitors from the United States cross the border here and elsewhere for a few distinctive reasons: Mexican culture (e.g., food, alcohol, and bullfights), gift shops in Acuna, Mexico, or stores in Tijuana, Mexico sex and prostitution (e.g., in Juarez, Mexico); medical services, such as cheap dental care and prescription drugs (e.g., in Mexican cities, such as Tijuana (south of San Diego) and Nogales (an hour south of Tucson), where up to $2 billion per year of prescription drug are bought by U.S. consumers.

Birthright Citizenship. Only about a sixth of the world’s nations practice birthright citizenship. The United States originally adopted it to end slavery, by making a citizen anyone born in the country and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”—a clause then meant to exclude sovereign Native-American tribes, and still used to exempt children of foreign diplomats. In 1982 the Supreme Court ruled that people who had entered America illegally also met the “subject to the jurisdiction” standard. A recent study by the Pew Hispanic Centre found that 8% of births in America are to illegal immigrants. Enterprising families do take advantage of the policy. The Washington Post recently wrote about a Chinese firm that charges women $14,750 for three-month stays in America to give birth, although the customers must acquire their own visas. Some rich South Korean and Latin American families do the same. But such “birth tourists” enter America legally, and mostly want their children to study there one day. Changing the rules would not be easy. A constitutional amendment requires two-thirds of both houses of Congress to approve it and three-quarters of the state legislatures to ratify it. Another Pew study found that the public opposed by 56% to 41%. The only alternative would be a law denying citizenship to the American-born children of illegal immigrants on the ground that they are not subject to American jurisdiction—which would conflict with the 1982 Supreme Court precedent. Source: The Economist, 21 August 2010.

Created by Ingolf Vogeler on 11 June 1997; last revised on 21 April 2011.