What Border?

TIJUANA, Mexico -- Angelica Escoto drops her children at school and leaves the country. She's back every afternoon to pick them up.

She is among more than 100,000 Mexicans who cross "the line" into California every day to work, shop, study, golf, walk on the beach, see a movie or attend a San Diego Padres game. Some 10 million Mexicans have border passes allowing them to travel up to 25 miles into the U.S. whenever they want.

They are part of the unique borderland between the U.S. and Mexico, a world of constant legal crossings that defies the emotional debate and fears of illegal immigration that led to President Bush's decision to deploy National Guard troops to the border.

The welcome mat is out for these bicultural fronterizo Mexicans, who are comfortable on either side. Every four days in Tijuana they cross in numbers equal to how many illegal immigrants sneak across the entire U.S. border every year to stay.

The frenetic back-and-forth contradicts the image of the U.S. as an increasingly unwelcoming place or of Mexico as a country that can't hold on to its people. But border dwellers worry that the U.S. is moving away from such openness and that there could be a chilling effect on them.

As the U.S. House and Senate prepare to hammer out final immigration-control legislation, officials here are striving to emphasize the mutually beneficial aspects of the border traffic, such as the $3 million that Mexicans spend in the San Diego area every day.

"The 200 miles on each side of the border have a dynamic of their own. It's like a third nation," said Rossana Fuentes-Berain, an expert in U.S.-Mexico relations. "It couldn't have developed like that with the spirit of what we're seeing, the idea that the U.S. is fencing itself off."

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who met with Mexican President Vicente Fox on Friday, warned that troops and barriers could hinder his city's $25 billion-a-year trade with Mexico, including spending by the 1.5 million Mexican tourists who visit each year.

"There's a circulation that's not well understood in Washington, nor in Mexico City," said Guillermo Alonso Meneses, an anthropologist at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana.

The border's complexities were evident last week when San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders went to Washington in the midst of the Senate's immigration debate to lobby for an additional border post to alleviate bottlenecks in legal crossings.

The contrasts are seen just inside San Diego's busiest crossing, where the imposing steel border fence stands above a factory outlet mall called "The Shops at Las Americas," built to attract a constant stream of Mexican day shoppers.

World's busiest border crossing

The San Ysidro Port of Entry between Tijuana and San Diego is the busiest border crossing in the world. But shoppers, legal agricultural workers and mothers carpooling children to private U.S. schools also spill into Calexico, Calif.; El Paso, McAllen and Brownsville in Texas; and other cities all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

The border divides not only two countries but also thousands of families. They are fluent not only in Spanish and English but also dollars and pesos and a kind of border-ese about traffic backups and on which side to find the freshest fruit or cheapest gasoline.

"It would be impossible to say, `Don't come,'" said Cristina Alatorre, 42, a U.S. resident waiting to cross back after visiting her sister. "Everybody has family on each side..."

News to Lou Dobbs and all the neo theo cons freaking at all the melanin: the premier Navy port/ resort/ Carlyle banking hub on the west coast couldn't function without cheap Mexican labor.

There is big Mexican money there too.

Perhaps the thing the racists really hate the most: beautiful Hispanic women and men living and loving and marrying and breeding happily with the locals. I'm sure there's nothing that makes the Minutemen fume more.

San Diego is one of the more beautiful cities I've seen, with a heavy police presence... the better to keep the glass and steel monoliths displacing the traditional Spanish architecture.

If there ever is a border crackdown, there will be massive unrest- and massive upheaval, because there is a big faction of the Company that will not tolerate it.