U.S. Border Patrol agents in four-wheel-drive trucks cruise the streets on the Arizona side, and scour the desert washes abutting the steel curtain. The armed guards are players in a never-ending and sometimes deadly game of cat and mouse with desperate Mexicans, looking for an out.
For the record, America doesn't want them here, and every day, the Border Patrol ships them back by the busload. Off the record, Mexicans are the backbone of the Southwestern U.S.'s blue-collar labor force.
Two kilometers west of the DeConcini Border Center, hundreds of Mexican trucks line up at the Mariposa crossing (Nogales is the third busiest port of entry into the United States).
Most of the trucks are loaded with fruits and vegetables--half the winter produce consumed in the U.S. comes through Nogales--or industrial items and consumer products assembled in maquilas by the same Mexicans we pay the guys with guns to keep behind the wall.
After a lengthy delay and cursory inspection for contraband, the trucks are waved across to deliver Americans clothes, food, cell phones, model airplanes and microcomputer mother boards.
Maquila-made products worth more than $54 billion entered the United States last year.
Americans want the goods, but would rather not know or deal with the people who make them. For a long time, America's official interest in Mexican workers has been strictly utilitarian. The maquiladoras are no different.
The industry took root in American soil worked by Mexican hands.
The year was 1942, and U.S. farmers in the Southwest were hurting for labor--most of their workers were fighting in World War II.
To alleviate the shortage, the U.S. government cut a deal with Mexico called the Braceros program, under which Mexican farmworkers from the country's interior were bused across the border and issued work permits.
More than 400,000 Mexicans worked in the U.S. during Braceros, which remained in effect until 1964. Under pressure from U.S. labor unions, President Kennedy cited widespread human-rights abuses and canceled the program.
The Mexican workers were deported, with the majority of them settling in border towns, where unemployment skyrocketed. Many crossed back into the U.S. to work illegally.
In 1966, Mexico created the Border Industrial Program, or BIP, the blueprint for the maquiladora industry of today. BIP created factories where companies could import machinery and raw materials, tax-free. The factories were required to re-export the finished materials to the United States.
BIP represented a dramatic shift from the domestic focus of Mexico's economic strategy, which, until then, was designed to reduce dependence on the international economy, and placed strict restrictions on foreign investment.
American and other foreign interests began to invest in these factories but were limited to a 49 percent share.
BIP was supposed to provide jobs to displaced Braceros workers. Instead, the factory managers recruited almost exclusively (95 percent) young women. Most of them had little education and had never held a job.
Perceived to have more nimble fingers and docile minds, Mexican women entered the labor force in record numbers, Rosa-the-Riveter without a cause.
By 1972, there were 455 factories operating under BIP, employing 76,000 workers.
That year, Mexican leaders began to strip the red tape on maquiladoras. A key piece of legislation exempted maquiladoras from a Mexican law limiting foreign ownership of any business to 49 percent.
From then on, the majority of maquilas were 100 percent American-owned as well as American-controlled.
Here's how maquiladoras work:
X Corp., a company based in Phoenix, makes and markets cellular phones. X Corp. sets up a wholly owned subsidiary called "X Corp. de Mexico" and leases land in a Mexican industrial park. X Corp. and its U.S. suppliers (only 2 percent of maquila materials are purchased in Mexico) ship all the parts needed to make X Corp. cell phones directly to the Mexican plant, and pay no import fee.
X Corp. de Mexico workers put together, package and ship the cell phones to an X Corp. warehouse in Tucson, where they're stamped "Made in America," and distributed to X Corp. customers nationwide.
The only tax X Corp. pays during the entire process is a "value-added" duty on the export of the final product. Most of the value added to the product is the low-cost Mexican labor.
Thus, the lower the wages, the lower the taxes.
When the U.S. economy went into recession in 1974, the maquila sector faltered. The demand for products dropped, and 32,000 Mexican workers--about half the work force--lost their jobs.
The recession and a militant labor movement nearly killed the maquiladora industry in its infancy. Maquila owners and the Mexican government worked closely to squash independent unions until the more moderate--and government-aligned--union, CTM, Confederacion de Trabajadores de Mexico, could regain control of the plants.
As the U.S. economy recovered, Mexican leaders excused maquiladoras from dozens of federal labor laws--including minimum-wage requirements, length of workweek, and terms of probationary employment that allowed maquilas to fire workers without severance pay.
These exemptions established the trend that continues today of maquiladoras operating well outside Mexico's laws, with the government's blessing and legislative support.
"The maquiladoras get cut any legal or enforcement slack they want, which only tightens the noose around the Mexican workers," says Leslie Gates, an American Friends Service Committee activist who lives in Tucson.
