For the past three decades, Ernesto Tapia’s neon-lit electronics shop in Nogales, Arizona, had been the prevailing regional destination for gearheads seeking tricked-out car stereos.
Some of his loyal customers would drive down to the small town on the US-Mexico border from Tucson, but most made the trek from the Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa.
But in recent years, as it has become more difficult to cross through the Nogales port of entry, fewer and fewer people have been stopping in. Over the Memorial Day weekend, just a handful of customers trickled in.
“We are forgotten,” said Tapia.
Nogales, Tapia felt, had borne the brunt of border policies and politics that weren’t concerned with what locals need.
Amid a surge in migration at the southern border, and in an election year when immigration has become a major concern for voters, Tapia and other Nogales residents said they were weary. Over the past several months, lawmakers and candidates from both political parties have come to visit and take photos with border security agents at the port of entry. Donald Trump has referred to the southern border as a “war zone”. Joe Biden has promised to “secure the border and secure it now” with harsh new restrictions on asylum seekers.
But security is the one thing Tapia isn’t worried about. “Nogales, Arizona, is one of the calmest cities in the United States,” he said. “Security is fine. It’s everything else that is bad.”
Across the street from Tapia’s Stereo City, the “for lease” signs in empty storefronts were beginning to fade in the sun. Two shoe stores and the cosmetics supplier had closed. Only a couple of mannequins remained at Sofia’s boutique. In a town of fewer than 20,000 people with a 28% poverty rate, some residents were worried about more business closures, and fewer jobs in town.
Jorge Felix Jr – who owns the uniform and workwear shop Felix Warehouse – suspects that American leaders’ characterizations of the border as a place of chaos, and incendiary rhetoric about Mexicans, hasn’t helped. “All I know is what the customers have said,” he said. “When Trump was in office, they didn’t like to come here. They said: ‘We don’t like your president,’ He has no respect.”
“Nogales has this really heavy stereotype. And I think that harms us,” said Luis Carlos Davis, a filmmaker and high school teacher who is running for district supervisor in Santa Cruz county, which encompasses Nogales.
Businesses in downtown Nogales are still reeling from the 20-month-long border closure during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Mexican nationals who came on tourist visas to shop in Nogales and other neighbouring border towns weren’t allowed to visit – devastating retailers. Even after the restrictions lifted, enhanced security measures, the understaffing of border officials and pressures from increased migration meant that shoppers looking to cross at the port had to sometimes wait three hours or longer.
In a city where 60% of sales tax revenue is generated from Mexican nationals, according to the Greater Nogales Port Authority, some business owners said they anxiously checked wait times at the port on a regular basis.
At the beginning of the year, the border’s Tucson sector – which includes Nogales and stretches east to the New Mexico border – became the busiest region for migrant crossings, placing new pressures on the ports.
Some in Nogales worried they would face a similar fate as Lukeville, Arizona. In December, border officials abruptly closed the port of entry there – announcing that they needed to redirect staff and resources to stop unlawful crossings in the region. The result was chaos, both for the migrants stranded on the Mexican side of the border, who were cut off from asylum, and for residents on the US side whose lives and livelihoods depended on the crossing.
Families were separated from loved ones on either side. The restaurants and gas stations in Lukeville that catered to the thousands who crossed through the port each day were suddenly left without customers. Arizona’s governor, Katie Hobbs, called the federal policy an “unmitigated disaster”.
Retailers weren’t the only businesses affected. About $31.6bn a year of produce, manufactured goods and other items cross through the Nogales port – the largest in Arizona – each year, according to the Greater Nogales Port Authority.
“Shutdowns do worry people,” said Josh Rubin, chair of the port authority. “It’s more about the image that it presents to the world.” The Lukeville port was a relatively small one, and luckily didn’t affect most truck traffic back and forth, he said. But what really concerns him is talk of a total border shutdown.
Trump had threatened to do so during his administration, and “shutdown” has become a bit of a catchphrase for both leading presidential candidates, whether they mean it as a total or conditional policy. “We want to make clear that the impact won’t be one-sided. You’re going to affect US businesses and also US consumers,” said Rubin. “We’re just hoping that everyone plays nice, whichever presidential candidate wins.”
Davis, the supervisor candidate, often reminisces about the Nogales he grew up in. Crossing back and forth on a daily basis used to be easy. His cousin lived on the Mexican side and crossed each day to attend school in the US. Friends would go shopping on the US side, and then out for dinner on the Mexican side.
Then, in the mid-1990s, during the Clinton administration, the chain-link cattle fence dividing the two cities was replaced with a steel wall. Subsequent administrations reinforced it with surveillance towers and barbed-wire.
US officials say 40% of the fentanyl in the US is smuggled through the Nogales region, and Biden has argued that enhanced security and harsher enforcement is needed in the area to crack down on cartels fueling a drug crisis in the US.
It’s true that smugglers and sicarios on the Mexican side of the border pose a threat, said Davis – he has interviewed some of them in his documentaries about the region.
But whether they cross legally or illegally, most migrants don’t stick around in Nogales for long, he said. They tend to head straight to Tucson, or other cities across the US to join family. Whether there are many migrants or a few, people in Nogales hardly notice. It isn’t overrun – it isn’t even crowded.
“This is a beautiful place, a peaceful place,” Davis said. “Here if I forget to lock my door, I don’t worry about it.” Davis moved from Phoenix back to Nogales during the pandemic because he wanted to be closer to his family and raise his children in a smaller town.
“But the economy, that’s what’s really suffering,” he said. As a candidate for district supervisor, he has been promoting economic-revitalization plans, including incentives to attract semiconductor manufacturers and bring in more jobs, more construction and more local business.
“We have to save ourselves. We’re very far from DC, very far from Mexico City. So a lot of politicians there don’t understand what it’s like here, and what we need,” he said.
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