In January, President Trump signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) into law, replacing the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The new trade pact is set to go into full effect July 1. Thanks to House Democrats from Southern California, the legislative act governing its implementation in the United States will provide $300 million for infrastructure to stop the chronic flow of sewage across the international border from Tijuana, Mexico — an ecological peril highlighted on a recent episode of “60 Minutes.”
Although this figure falls short of the $400 million local authorities believe will be necessary, the funding offers some hope for San Diego communities downstream along the Tijuana River, where the problem has lowered the quality of life since the 1930s. Last year alone, over 2.3 billion gallons of wastewater and polluted runoff crossed the line, contaminating U.S. properties, beaches and wildlife habitats. For border-area residents, as San Diego County prepares for the risks of reopening businesses and public places, the novel coronavirus is not the only public health threat.
U.S. policymakers understand quite well the impact of Mexico’s wastewater management on American communities. What they fail to comprehend is that the ongoing border sewage crisis is rooted in a longer history of U.S. imperialism and private enterprise in the San Diego-Tijuana region. Understanding the historical developments that created the problem is essential for addressing it moving forward.
In 1846, U.S. forces invaded northern Mexico, claiming Manifest Destiny — the belief that Americans were ordained to spread their civilization across an “untamed” continent and to make more productive use of its land. After almost two years of bloodshed, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred roughly half of the country’s territory to the United States. In establishing the new international border, American authorities ensured U.S. acquisition of San Diego Bay, a key entryway to the Pacific. The result was an arbitrary line several miles south, intersecting the Tijuana River.
The cession of land was a cession of wealth, and by the turn of the century, the U.S.-Mexico border separated the world’s largest national economy from the poorer, developing world. For this reason, it has tended to function as an international gateway of opportunity, drawing American capital south and Mexican workers north. These migrations have fueled explosive urban growth in the binational region — and many of its environmental troubles. Over time, the United States has established greater crossing restrictions at the boundary, but the river and its pollutants have obeyed only the law of gravity.
During Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, Mexico’s post-revolutionary government invited American entrepreneurs to open saloons and gambling resorts south of the line to generate economic growth and urban development. Tax revenue from these businesses funded municipal services and urban infrastructure in Tijuana. Migrants from the Mexican interior came for jobs, transforming the town from a frontier outpost of 1,200 residents to a municipality of over 12,000. By 1931, the city’s septic system could barely handle the daily swarms of international visitors, let alone this surging population and overflowing sewage contaminated American drinking water downstream. After much wrangling over accountability, U.S. and Mexican officials came together in 1935 to construct a transborder sewer system, disposing of Tijuana’s wastewater through an ocean outfall pipe just north of the boundary, off the coast of southern San Diego County. By the end of the decade, the problem appeared to be under control.
Then came a larger boom. From World War II to the mid-1960s, the U.S.-Mexico “bracero” contract labor program lured large numbers of Mexican migrants to work on California farms. As a springboard to the north, a temporary dwelling place for seasonal workers and home to many cross-border commuters, Tijuana swelled from about 16,000 people to more than 340,000 in less than three decades.
Unprepared for this influx, the city expanded informally, with squatter settlements spreading across the urban periphery. Most homes had no plumbing. Those that did drained into overloaded septic tanks. As the river carried polluted runoff across the border, the international outfall pipe discharged untreated effluent along the southern stretch of California’s shoreline. In 1958, San Diego proposed connecting Tijuana to its modern sewer system. But Mexico, in keeping with its post-revolutionary ideal of national autonomy, constructed a treatment and disposal system of its own.
This too became insufficient amid continuing rapid growth. In the mid-1960s, the Mexican government initiated its Border Industrialization Program, enticing American and, later, Asian manufacturers to transplant their assembly operations south of the line, duty-free, with promises of cheaper labor and fewer regulations. By the 1970s, large numbers of transnational companies were shipping materials to their Mexico maquiladoras (twin plants), where workers assembled electronics and other products to be transported back across the international line for U.S. consumption. Once again drawing workers from the country’s interior, this transborder economy has helped propel Tijuana’s population to more than 2 million today.
For nearly a half-century, the river — now a concrete flood-control channel on the Mexican side — has carried industrial toxins in addition to human waste, impacting coastal areas up to 10 miles north.
But rather than seeing this simply as a case of Mexico polluting the United States, we must understand that southbound capital flows and northbound sewage flows are two parts of the same story. After a U.S. war of expansion partitioned the Tijuana River Basin, American businesses have driven nearly a century of unmanageable growth below the line, bolstering the binational region’s economy with a vast reserve of cheap labor while fueling environmental disasters.
American taxpayers may object to funding infrastructure for solving a problem originating in Mexico. But the $300 million provisioned in the USMCA legislation is small change compared to the billions that industries employing Tijuana labor pour into the U.S. economy every year. A fraction of this wealth could go a long way toward preventing the ecological damage that accompanies its creation. Besides, if the proposed improvements succeed in preventing contaminated water from crossing the border, American communities downstream will be the real winners.