SCERP Monograph Series · Volume 4
About the Book
What did NAFTA actually do to the communities where the United States and Mexico meet? U.S.-Mexican Border Communities in the NAFTA Era moves that question away from national abstractions and onto the border itself. Edited by SDSU economist and border scholar Norris C. Clement, this fourth volume in The U.S.-Mexican Border Environment series examines the first years of NAFTA through the demographic, economic, infrastructure, environmental, and quality-of-life changes experienced by communities from California and Baja California to Texas and Tamaulipas.
The timing matters. NAFTA took effect on January 1, 1994, amid promises of greater prosperity, improved infrastructure, a cleaner environment, and stronger cross-border relations. But the decade immediately complicated any simple verdict: Mexico's December 1994 peso crisis transformed exchange rates and border retail trade; the U.S. economy entered a long expansion; foreign investment and maquiladora employment accelerated on the Mexican side; and political decentralization in Mexico created new possibilities for local and cross-border governance. Rather than attributing every change to NAFTA, the study asks how these forces interacted in particular border places.
The result is a portrait of a region defined by both interdependence and asymmetry. The border economy had long linked twin cities through labor, shopping, manufacturing, transportation, tourism, and investment; NAFTA intensified some of those connections while altering others. The report repeatedly resists treating the nearly 2,000-mile boundary as a single economy. San Diego and Imperial County differ sharply; so do El Paso, Laredo, Nogales, Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Mexicali, and the other communities examined here.
Published in 2002, the monograph now doubles as a remarkably detailed baseline document for the NAFTA era: a snapshot of border integration before the security transformations of the post-9/11 period, before the Great Recession, and long before NAFTA was replaced by the USMCA.
How the Study Works
The project grew out of the Network of Border Economics / Red de la Economía Fronteriza (NOBE/REF), a binational network linking researchers and institutions in the United States and Mexico. Support came from institutions including San Diego State University, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, and the El Paso Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
The research combines two kinds of evidence: existing demographic and economic data, and surveys of people working inside border communities. On the U.S. side alone, 147 respondents from local government, quasi-governmental organizations, newspapers and academia, and nongovernmental organizations contributed local assessments. The study compares those perceptions with quantitative indicators and parallel research on Mexican border communities.
Its objectives are unusually practical: not only to determine what changed during the NAFTA era, but to identify the indicators and analytical tools border communities need to monitor their own economies, infrastructure, environment, and quality of life—and to give local, state, and national decision makers a better empirical basis for policy.
What the Report Found
- Border growth was real but uneven. Population and economic expansion accelerated across the region, but the effects differed dramatically by community, industry, and side of the boundary.
- The Mexican border economy changed especially rapidly. Maquiladora expansion, foreign investment, and trade contributed to strong employment and income growth, even as rapid population growth placed pressure on infrastructure and public services.
- Most U.S. border communities still lagged national income levels. San Diego was a conspicuous exception; elsewhere high unemployment and relatively low wages remained persistent problems despite job growth.
- Cross-border retail patterns shifted. Liberalization, peso-dollar fluctuations, and the growth of retail options in Mexico changed the longstanding flow of Mexican consumers into U.S. border stores.
- Economic and environmental questions could not be separated. The SCERP project treated a strong economic base, infrastructure investment, environmental quality, and sustainable development as interlocking border-policy problems.
- Better local data mattered. Respondents on both sides emphasized the need for systems capable of monitoring economic conditions and forecasting infrastructure needs rather than relying on national averages or anecdote.
The SCERP Monograph Series
This book is Monograph 4 in the Southwest Consortium for Environmental Research and Policy (SCERP) series The U.S.-Mexican Border Environment, edited generally by Paul Ganster and produced through SDSU's Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias. The series brought researchers from both countries to bear on water, economy, infrastructure, vulnerability, energy, tribal environmental issues, transboundary ecosystems, and other border questions.
The Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias now identifies the SCERP monographs as out of print and makes the series available digitally. Explore the SCERP series at IRSC.
About Norris C. Clement
Norris C. Clement was a longtime professor of economics at San Diego State University and a foundational figure in SDSU border studies. He and Miguel Ángel Cárdenas established the Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias in 1983, serving as its interim co-directors; Clement later served as an associate director and as Director of International Projects. His work ranged across the San Diego-Tijuana regional economy, maquiladora development, North American economic integration, border institutions, and comparative transboundary cooperation.
That institutional history matters to this volume. U.S.-Mexican Border Communities in the NAFTA Era emerges from decades of SDSU research that treated the border not as the edge of two separate national stories, but as a region requiring binational data, collaboration, and policy analysis. Explore the IRSC archival collection at SDSU.