Why El Paso Is the Opposite of Every U.S. City

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[00:00:00]El Paso, Texas, 678,000 [music] people. Ranked one of the three safest large cities in America five consecutive years by FBI uniform crime report data.

[00:00:13]Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, directly across the street, one of the five most dangerous cities on Earth. Same years. [music] You can walk between them in under 4 minutes.

[00:00:25]12,000 people do it every day on one bridge.

[00:00:29]>> [music] >> The Rio Grande between them, the dramatic natural barrier everyone pictures, is at this crossing about 60 ft wide, often ankle-deep. 18 miles of steel bollard wall, four international ports of entry, the most heavily monitored river crossing in North America.

[00:00:48]$80 billion in freight moves [music] through here every year, more than most US states generate in trade. [music] This is not a border story. This is a city that one political act cut in half, and the two halves became opposites.

[00:01:04]Here is what makes El Paso genuinely unlike any other American city of its size.

[00:01:09]Take the FBI's [music] uniform crime report rankings from 2019 through 2023.

[00:01:16]El Paso does not occasionally appear near the top. It holds.

[00:01:21]Year after year, it sits alongside Honolulu and Virginia Beach as one of the three safest large cities in the United States. For a city of nearly 700,000 people, that is not incidental.

[00:01:35]Most cities of that size carry neighborhoods that pull the averages down. High crime zip codes, concentrated violence, clusters the department treats as chronic.

[00:01:46]El Paso does not carry those the same way. It just quietly ranks among the safest large places in America and stays there.

[00:01:55]Now, cross the bridge. The Consejo Ciudadano para la Seguridad Pública y la Justicia Penal, the Mexican nonprofit that tracks and ranks global homicide rates, has placed Ciudad Juárez among the five most violent cities in the world during the same five-year window.

[00:02:14]Not the most violent in Mexico, among the most violent on Earth.

[00:02:19]Their methodology uses official homicide tallies per 100,000 residents. [music] The same standard the FBI applies on the American side.

[00:02:29]Together, El Paso and Juárez form a metropolitan area of 2.7 million people, the largest binational metro in the Western Hemisphere.

[00:02:39]Their downtown cores [music] are less than 5 miles apart. Their economies are structurally interlocked. Their families overlap across generations. [music] The air they breathe comes from the same desert basin.

[00:02:52]One half of this continuous urban mass is statistically among the safest large cities in America.

[00:03:00]The other half is statistically among the most dangerous cities on Earth.

[00:03:05]That is not a contrast you explain with culture or poverty or local crime patterns in isolation.

[00:03:11]Something structural produced this.

[00:03:14]Something structural reproduces it every year.

[00:03:18]Stand on the Paso del Norte International [music] Bridge and look in both directions. Below you, the Rio Grande. Not the wide roiling river most people picture when they hear the name.

[00:03:30]At this crossing, one of the most monitored points of geography in North America, it is roughly 60 ft wide.

[00:03:37]During dry months, which is most months in this desert, it can be waded.

[00:03:42]This is the dramatic natural barrier.

[00:03:45]These are the dimensions of what politicians have called an invasion route.

[00:03:50]Running alongside it, far more dominant in the physical landscape, 18 miles of steel bollard wall up to 30 ft tall, reinforced under the Secure Fence Act of 2006, >> [music] >> and expanded again between 2017 and 2021.

[00:04:07]The wall does not simply parallel the riverbank. It cuts through what was once connected urban fabric, streets that formerly crossed, neighborhoods that now terminate at steel.

[00:04:19]Four international bridges span this divide. The Paso del Norte Bridge, which handles pedestrian and vehicle traffic.

[00:04:27]The Bridge of the Americas, six lanes open 24 hours. The Isleta-Zaragoza International Bridge, further east. The Tornillo-Guadalupe Port of Entry, >> [music] >> the newest and most recently expanded.

[00:04:41]On the Paso del Norte alone, 12,000 pedestrian crossings per day.

[00:04:46]Adjacent to it, nearly touching it, runs the BNSF Railway International Rail Bridge.

[00:04:53]That bridge is the physical spine of the United States-Mexico manufacturing supply chain.

[00:04:58]More than 80 billion dollars in annual freight, auto parts, electronics, agricultural goods, industrial components.

[00:05:07]More trade than most American states generate in a year.

[00:05:11]Here is the strange part.

[00:05:13]The things that ignore the border are the things you cannot see.

[00:05:18]The Hueco Bolson Aquifer runs beneath both cities without acknowledgement of the international line.

[00:05:24]El Paso Water Utilities has documented its depletion in long-range planning reports for decades. The USGS published open-file report 2001-414, specifically modeling the aquifer's decline. It serves both cities. There is still no binding binational management agreement governing how it is drawn down.

[00:05:48]The Franklin Mountains extend through both sides. The desert basin fills both cities with the same air. Everything underground and overhead ignores the border.

[00:05:58]Only the surface is divided.

[00:06:02]Ana Karen Carrillo has crossed the Paso del Norte bridge so many times the wall has become background.

[00:06:09]She is a graduate student at the University of Texas at El Paso.

[00:06:14]She lives on the American side in a neighborhood about 15 minutes on foot from the bridge.

[00:06:20]Her family is in Juarez. She crosses multiple times a week for Sunday meals, for family appointments, for the ordinary texture of a life that does not organize itself around international borders just because governments draw them.

[00:06:36]Her commute, front door to family home, takes about 25 minutes. She walks out of one of the three safest cities in America.

[00:06:45]She crosses a 60-ft river on a bridge built for international freight processing. She shows her passport. She walks into one of the five most dangerous cities on Earth. She does this in the same shoes, through the same mountain air.

[00:07:02]There are 12,000 people making some version of that crossing every single day on the Paso del Norte bridge alone.

[00:07:09]Workers crossing for factory shifts, students commuting to UTEP from Juarez, parents picking up children, nurses heading to hospital work, vendors moving goods by hand.

[00:07:22]People whose lives were built decades before the wall was most recently reinforced, whose families were never sorted cleanly onto one side of the line, who did not choose to become residents of a paradox.

[00:07:35]Ana Karen does not describe the experience >> [music] >> as crossing into a foreign country.

[00:07:40]Her framing is exact and deliberate.

[00:07:43]It is like going to the other side of town except you need a passport.

[00:07:48]That is not casual nostalgia.

[00:07:50]It is structurally accurate.

[00:07:53]These two cities were one place once.

[00:07:56]The passport is not proof of how foreign Juarez is to El Paso.

[00:08:01]It is evidence of what was done to a place that did not begin divided.

[00:08:06]The wall made the separation visible.

[00:08:09]The daily commute makes the construction of that separation impossible to look away from.

[00:08:16]To understand why this happened, you have to go back to February 2nd, 1948.

[00:08:22]That is the date the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the Mexican-American War.

[00:08:29]Under its terms, Mexico ceded roughly half its territory to the United States.

[00:08:35]The Rio Grande, from its mouth to present-day El Paso, became the international border.

[00:08:41]The problem: There was already a town there. Paso del Norte had existed since the [music] late 16th century.

[00:08:49]Franciscan missionaries formally established a settlement in 1659.

[00:08:52][music] By 1948, it was a community of roughly 10,000 people occupying both banks of the Rio Grande, sharing the same water, the same trade routes, [music] the same extended families, the same agricultural land.

[00:09:08]>> [music] >> When the negotiators at Guadalupe Hidalgo put their signatures to the document, nobody in Paso del Norte moved.

[00:09:16]Nobody was asked to.

[00:09:19]The line was drawn through the middle of a living settlement. The northern bank became El Paso del Norte, Texas, [music] later shortened to El Paso.

[00:09:28]The southern bank kept the original name until 1888, when it was renamed Ciudad Juarez in honor of Benito Juarez, >> [music] >> the Mexican president who had governed from exile there during the French intervention.

[00:09:43]Five years after the original treaty, the United States and Mexico signed the Gadsden Purchase on December 30th, 1853.

[00:09:52]The goal was not demographic reorganization.

[00:09:55]It was to settle a railroad routing dispute and acquire a lower altitude corridor for a southern transcontinental rail line.

[00:10:03]The purchase adjusted the border further south and west. It moved the line again.

[00:10:08]It did not acknowledge in any formal way that a single community had already been cut in two.

[00:10:15]Everything built after 1848, every wall segment, every international bridge, every port of entry, every freight terminal, every water negotiation, every bilateral security agreement has been constructed on top of that original act.

[00:10:31]The border wall is not the origin of the problem. It is infrastructure built to enforce a line that was itself drawn through a town.

[00:10:40]This is what makes El Paso structurally unlike every other American city of its size. It is not merely adjacent to Mexico. It is one half of something. The other half sits in a different country, governed by different institutions, funded differently, policed differently, and connected to American supply chains in a way that benefits the American side far more than the Mexican one.

[00:11:05]But they are geographically, historically, and hydrologically the same place.

[00:11:12]Here is what both governments knew and [music] when.

[00:11:16]In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement [music] came into force.

[00:11:21]NAFTA was designed to lower trade barriers and expand manufacturing integration between the United States, [music] Canada, and Mexico.

[00:11:30]In the El Paso-Juarez corridor, it worked faster and more intensely than almost anywhere else on the border.

[00:11:38]The maquiladora system, [music] the export assembly factory model that had existed in limited form since the border industrialization program of 1965, >> [music] >> expanded dramatically after NAFTA.

[00:11:52]Juarez became a production hub. Its maquiladora workforce reached approximately 300,000 workers by the early [music] 2000.

[00:12:02]Those workers assembled automotive components for Ford, General Motors, and Delphi.

[00:12:07]They built electronics sold in American retail chains. They produced goods that moved north through [music] the same El Paso ports of entry that exist today.

[00:12:17]Juarez became, in effect, an industrial suburb of the United States economy built to supply American manufacturing, >> [music] >> located in a Mexican city that received no proportional investment in public safety, civic infrastructure, or [music] economic diversification.

[00:12:35]The consequences were predictable.

[00:12:37]The maquiladora model concentrated low-wage labor in a city with limited government capacity and increasingly active organized crime competing for the same cross-border corridor.

[00:12:50]From 2008 to 2012, >> [music] >> the cartel conflict over the Juarez Plaza, the primary cross-border smuggling route, became open urban warfare.

[00:13:02]More than 10,000 people were killed in 4 years in a city of roughly 1.3 million.

[00:13:09]The US State Department issued standing travel warnings for Chihuahua state throughout the period.

[00:13:15]The DEA ran active intelligence operations on both sides of the border.

[00:13:21]The Mexican federal government, >> [music] >> under President Felipe Calderon, deployed the army to Juarez in 2008.

[00:13:28]Both governments were fully informed.

[00:13:31]The structural conditions producing the violence, export dependent industrialization without civic investment, organized crime with deep [music] roots in the cross-border corridor, had been documented in government reports and academic literature for [music] years before the killing peaked.

[00:13:49]The US infrastructure response, >> [music] >> more wall, more vehicle barriers, additional customs and border protection capacity to keep [music] trade moving, not a binational development framework, not joint civic investment in the shared metropolitan area that NAFTA had spent a decade building.

[00:14:09]Meanwhile, the Hueco Bolson kept depleting.

[00:14:13]The USGS data kept accumulating.

[00:14:16]No binding binational aquifer agreement [music] was reached.

[00:14:21]In the 2010s, the United States invested heavily in El Paso's trade infrastructure.

[00:14:28]The ports of entry were expanded and modernized.

[00:14:32]CBP processing facilities were upgraded.

[00:14:35]The Isleta-Zaragoza Bridge received significant capital investment to increase [music] vehicle throughput.

[00:14:42]By the early 2020s, El Paso's international ports were processing over $80 billion in annual [music] freight, ranking them among the highest volume land ports in the United States.

[00:14:56]Automotive supply chains, electronics assembly, agriculture, industrial goods, the manufacturing relationship between the two countries runs directly through this corridor.

[00:15:08]By the metric it was designed to serve, efficient cross-border But here is what it clarified. The infrastructure built across this border in the 2010s was optimized for goods, not for people.

[00:15:25]>> [music] >> The BNSF rail bridge moves over $80 billion in freight annually.

[00:15:32]It carries no passengers.

[00:15:34]The Paso del Norte pedestrian bridge, handling 12,000 crossings daily, operates at capacity during peak hours with inspection infrastructure that was not built for that volume.

[00:15:47]Wait times during peak crossings, early morning factory shifts, school hours, afternoon returns, routinely stretch beyond 90 minutes.

[00:15:56]The city's infrastructure was built in order of economic priority.

[00:16:00]>> [music] >> Freight first, people second.

[00:16:03]The wealth generated by this integrated economy did not distribute symmetrically across the line.

[00:16:09]Juarez housed the assembly workers.

[00:16:12]El Paso housed the distribution warehouses, the logistics operations, [music] the UTEP campus, the hospital network that Juarez residents crossed the border to access because public health infrastructure on their side had not kept pace with the industrial growth.

[00:16:30]The maquiladora model, deepened by NAFTA and reinforced by the port expansions of the 2010s, extracted labor from one side and captured value on the other.

[00:16:42]The port investments made the economic integration more efficient. They did not make it more equitable. They deepened the connection between the two halves of this city while formalizing the asymmetry between them.

[00:16:54]The wall got taller through the same decade. The bridges got busier. The cargo volumes grew.

[00:17:01]The civic gap between the two halves of this metropolitan area remained because none of the infrastructure investment was directed at it. It was directed at the freight gap. Go back to the opening image. Same mountain. Same aquifer. Same air. Same original settlement established before either nation existed in its current form.

[00:17:25]Two cities whose downtowns sit 5 miles apart and whose safety statistics are separated by a distance that almost no other paired urban areas on Earth can match.

[00:17:36]El Paso is not the opposite of other American cities because it is an anomaly.

[00:17:42]It is the opposite because it is the most legible American city, the place where the effects of a political boundary are most visible, most measurable, and [music] least deniable.

[00:17:54]The border wall is not the cause of the divergence between El Paso and Juarez.

[00:17:59]It is the physical residue of 175 years of decisions made on a single premise that the line drawn on February 2, 1848, divided two foreign places.

[00:18:13]It did not. It divided one place and every subsequent decision, who received federal infrastructure investment, who received trade corridor development, who supplied the maquiladora labor, and who captured the profits, who received the wall, and who was placed behind it, followed from that original mismeasurement.

[00:18:34]El Paso's safety is real and not accidental.

[00:18:38]It is the accumulated result of being on the American side of the line, federal law enforcement architecture, stable civic institutions, a university, [music] a public hospital network, water rights with legal documentation, and the full weight [music] of US public investment applied to one half of what was once a single community.

[00:19:00]Juarez received the other half of the same geography and received decades [music] of a different calculation.

[00:19:07]When you stand on the Paso del Norte bridge and look in both directions, you are not looking at two foreign cities that happen to sit near each [music] other.

[00:19:16]You are looking at one city.

[00:19:18]And at the exact point where in 1848 [music] one nation decided it ended.