News

Border Businesses Thrive amid Recession, Violence

Source Frontera NorteSur, University of New Mexico

For some businesses on this side of the US-Mexico border, not all is doom and gloom. Offering a 2 for 1 deal like a Happy Hour special, a Nissan dealership in Laredo, Texas, is doing a brisk business with Mexican customers. With the purchase of an Armada SUV from Paul Young`s Family Nissan of Laredo, buyers are given an Altima car to take home for three years.

Company salesman Jaime Aguilar said Armada sales have jumped three or four hundred percent in recent months. Of 67 Armadas sold, Aguilar said, about half were purchased by Mexican nationals, including residents of Queretaro, Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo. Mexican comedian Carlos Villagran even snatched up one of the specials, the salesman said.

“No down payment is (always) required,” Aguilar affirmed, adding many Mexican customers obtain bank loans.

The Laredo Nissan dealership’s new bonanza constrasts with the luck of counterparts across the border. In Mexico, new auto sales dipped 6.8 percent in 2008.

Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexican citizens are allowed to import new automobiles and trucks tariff-free as long as they obtain a certificate of origin that shows their new vehicle was manufactured in one of the three NAFTA member nations. Mexican citizens still must pay a 15 percent value-added tax in addition to registration and import fees on new vehicles.

Hundreds of miles to the north, in El Paso, Texas, another business sector that is witnessing bust elsewhere in the US is exhibiting surprising vibrancy. El Paso real estate agents report a healthy market due in good measure to the presence of home and property buyers from Ciudad Juarez, many of whom are presumably fleeing the violence that claimed more than 1,600 lives in their city in 2008.

Although no precise numbers are immediately available on the percentage of new homebuyers who hail from El Paso’s sister city, some agents report showing more and more homes to interested Juarenses.

El Paso business leaders say other infusions of new cash from Ciudad Juarez are circulating in the local economy. For instance, real estate broker Juan Uribe said investors from Ciudad Juarez recently financed the construction of five shopping centers in the Texas border city. According to the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, a dozen new Mexican-owned businesses have opened their doors on US soil.

Like El Paso, different migration and capital flight trends emerged around San Diego and Laredo during the last four or five years, as a still-undetermined number of well-off Mexicans fled narco-fanned violence in Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo.

Sources: Agencia Reforma, January 12 and 13, 2009. Articles by Martha Cazares and Sara Cantera. Dallas Morning News, January 12, 2009. Article by Alfredo Corchado and Monica Ortiz Uribe. WorldNow and KVIA (El Paso), January 10, 2009. Article by Angela Kocherga.