I usually cross the border into Tijuana at least once a week and return
late at night the same day. This time it's been a month. Generally I drive
in, but the delays returning by car are as much as 4 hours, depending upon
the time of day. Even after 11 pm, when normally it takes about 20 minutes
to cross, delays have been 45 minutes to an hour.

San Diego and Tijuana are one economic unit. Large numbers of Mexicans
cross the border daily to work in the US, others cross to shop. These are
almost all legal crossings. The illegals in general cross elsewhere--to
cross here you need papers, and phoney papers are very expensive. Families
often straddle the border, and members of the middle class often have homes
on both sides. The same, to a lesser degree, is true of gringos--some live
in the US and work in Mexico, and increasingly gringos live in Mexico and
cross the line to work.

Avenida Revolution in Tijuana and the streets around it are devoted to the
care and feeding of tourists from San Diego. I walked several blocks up the
avenue. It was a ghost town. Rock music still blared from the balconies of
the 2nd story clubs, but there were no customers drinking margaritas. The
stores selling leathergoods or low-quality handicrafts or pharmaceuticals
were empty. Even the women and children from the far south of Mexico who
normally beg or sell chiclets were gone.

Each of these businesses support, more or less, a dozen people. No one
except the owners has any reserve. The owners, many of them, have a pretty
tenuous grip on their middle class status, and commercial rents in the
tourist district are high. There is no unemployment insurance.

I got a lift back to the US side at 2 am, so my plan to avoid the line and
walk across came to naught. We waited only 45 minutes. Of the 24 lanes only
4 were open--the wee hours are short-shifted. In the other 20 lanes dark,
silent cars were lined up dozens deep. Their owners were sleeping in the
back seats, waiting for the lanes to open at 4. Otherwise, they would have
to count on 4 hours to get across, which for many of them would mean loss
of jobs.

The reason the lines are slow is because the border guards are scrutinizing
the crossers more carefully. At the best of times, even with the sniffing
dogs constantly on the prowl, our government guesses that it detects 10% of
contraband, whether drugs, Cuban cigars, guns or illegals armed with forged
documents. No one else thinks the batting average is that good. And no one
seems to think it's improved. But almost all the cars are having their
trunks searched, and the eyeballing is more intense.

One of the problems with this approach is pretty obvious. A great many
Mexicans could pass for arabs in Cairo--the arab population of medieval
Spain was pretty active. My friend Eduardo Arellano has a reading on this
side in two weeks. He's thinking of shaving his beard to cross the border.

Another cost.

Mark