LAREDO, Texas — From the time the truck rolled up to the U.S. Customs checkpoint from the Mexican half of the World Trade Bridge until it drove forward into the 100-degree sun of south Texas, only 27 seconds passed. While other trucks with trailers can languish for hours as federal agents screen them for anything from methamphetamine and cocaine to counterfeit and pirated goods, the four novel lanes for “free and secure trade for commercial vehicles,” or FAST program, acts a sort of TSA PreCheck for the bridge’s most frequent truck travelers, which comes to about 20,000 daily.
Considering that the bridge itself transports more dollars of trade than any other land port in the country and that Port Laredo is responsible for nearly half of U.S. trade with Mexico, every minute counts. Officials estimate that $1 million worth of trade traverses the border every minute. Even before the worst migrant crisis in the nation’s history brought chaos to all sectors of the border, standard delays to commercial crossings cost the U.S. economy more than $1 billion in 2019.
The U.S.-Mexico border is the epicenter of a record-shattering influx of at least 10 million illegal migrants who have entered the country since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office. But it’s also our single largest commercial thoroughfare. After the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement went into effect during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, our trade with China began to crumble while trade with Mexico skyrocketed. With $807 billion worth of trade last year, Mexico became our single largest trading partner for the first time in our nation’s history.
With a secure border, expedited security, and expanded access points for commercial travel, U.S.-Mexico trade can successfully ice out China from Western markets in a process economists refer to as “friendshoring” or “nearshoring.” But bad border policy puts the entire enterprise in jeopardy.
The Washington Examiner recently toured the World Trade Bridge and Port Laredo with the executive leadership of the International Bank of Commerce, one of Texas’s largest banks and the preferred lender to stakeholders and companies on both sides of the border.
By the time we visited Laredo, the success of Operation Lone Star, Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R-TX) military operation to combat the border crisis, was visibly vindicated. Border crossings in the Laredo sector are down 74% from 2021, while in the San Diego sector on the California side of the U.S.-Mexico border, they remain twice as high as they were three years ago.
But OLS hasn’t come without its costs, with commercial travel repeatedly halted for heightened screenings and CBP staff diverted to migrant processing. By the end of last year, commercial trade across the border was stopped entirely. Of the 102 commercial processing lanes along the southern border, more than half are in Port Laredo, incurring brutal costs not just to the Texas economy, which has a trade surplus with Mexico, but to the rest of the country.
“That was a very scary time for us because of the fact that that was completely disrupting trade,” International Bank of Commerce CEO Dennis Nixon said. “But they had no choice because they were demands, so much of the demands of processing so many illegals coming across.”
Nearly half of all illegal drug seizures throughout the Biden administration have occurred at the southern border, with virtually all fentanyl smuggled through official ports of entry. At the World Trade Bridge, which has boasted repeated narcotics busts of tens of millions of dollars during the border crisis, CBP showed us its flagship Low Energy Portal Non-Intrusive Inspection systems.
“These noninvasive inspection points are X-ray machines through which now truck operators don’t have to get out of the truck while the truck passes, so now you’re getting 125 trucks passing through the hour passing through these inspection points,” said Daniel Covarrubias, the director of the Texas Center for Border Economic and Enterprise Development at Texas A&M International University’s business school.
Technology alone cannot compensate for the dramatic demand for commercial trade across the border. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994, trade between Texas and Mexico has increased by more than 700%, including 60% just since the follow-on agreement, USMCA, took effect.
“By virtue of our strategic location with I-35, the World Trade Bridge has become the No. 1 port of entry, but there haven’t really been improvements in 24 years,” IBC Executive Vice President Gerry Schwebel noted.
Border sky view illustrates cross-border trade benefits
The IBC took us 500 feet up over Laredo in a helicopter flown by Schwebel, an Army pilot while serving in South Korea some half-century ago. The city has a quarter-million people, but millions of square feet of warehouses and container parks sprawl across the American banks of the Rio Grande. Thanks to local landowners such as the IBC, which razed its riverside park, Lago Del Rio, of invasive brush such as carrizo and salt cedar, much of the Laredo border is visible for the drone and video technology deployed by both federal agents and the Texas National Guard to surveil.
The line of trucks awaiting entry into America on the World Trade Bridge bled multiple miles into Mexico, After years of an aggressive push by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to force an expansion of the World Trade Bridge, Biden finally approved a permit as a rider to this year’s National Defense Authorization Act in June. Earlier this October, Biden approved the long-awaited “4/5 Bridge” to run parallel to the World Trade Bridge, with trucks not enrolled in FAST often languishing from three to four hours in total time to cross during rush hour.
Contrary to the claims of NAFTA’s critics, trade liberalization has proven a net positive for overall economic growth and employment. Texas’s border counties that once suffered double-digit unemployment rates before trade liberalization have since achieved full employment. Border employment has more than doubled since NAFTA’s passage, and 1 in 5 jobs in Texas overall is supported by trade today.
But the border crisis, from the fentanyl influx to migrant smuggling, still obstructs the grand friendshoring experiment from reaching either its diplomatic or economic potential. The real fault is not that of Abbott or CBP or even the limitations of physical bridges themselves, but rather the demand induced by the current White House policy that promises any migrant who claims asylum on U.S. soil will not be deported.
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“The thing that frustrates me is that the U.S. side seems to think that this is disorganized,” Nixon said. “It’s not disorganized. That’s why they call it organized crime. These people are very organized. They’re very good at what they do. They adapt, they change, they move. They move their processes around, determining how they’re going to do things and where the soft points along the border are, and they’re going to continue to do that.”
That is until something, or someone in governance, changes.
Tiana Lowe Doescher is an economics columnist for the Washington Examiner.
