TIJUANA — The last time it was this easy to drive legally through the world's busiest land border crossing, San Diego was a parochial Navy port and Tijuana was half its size.
Little more than a year ago, the San Ysidro crossing was a fume-bathed, bumper-to-bumper bottleneck where motorists sat for hours in gridlock that frayed nerves, inspired fistfights and defied the close cross-border cooperation promised under the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Rush-hour traffic, holiday shoppers and the occasional rude U.S. inspector still rile commuters, but today, most drive north through San Ysidro in 20 minutes or less, on the average, INS officials say.
For policymakers who see the border as the heartbeat of a vibrant binational economy, this represents a not-so-small victory in the struggle to fine-tune the inspection stations that sift the vast U.S.-bound stream of humanity. Their vision is a border as fine-tuned as a perfectly synchronized Swiss watch.
But in an age when smugglers have concealed cocaine in canned chili peppers, exotic baby snakes in bra cups and ozone-eroding Freon in contraband canisters, law enforcement guardians are still concerned about making the border too easy to cross. To them, the car crossings are a final sieve to trap northbound drugs, southbound stolen cars and U.S. guns that officials fear will end up in the hands of drug cartels and criminals.
The debate over how to best balance the two concerns is not likely to go away in an era in which drug abuse is among the most pressing U.S. problems. But increasingly, a new generation of border architects is arguing that the U.S. crossings can act as a bulwark against contraband without being a clumsy obstacle to an increasingly integrated region.
*
"There has been a paradigm change in the way we see the border," said San Diego U.S. Atty. Alan Bersin, President Clinton's Southwest border czar. "The traditional view was that enforcement was adverse to traffic and commerce.
"The old antithesis has been rejected," Bersin said.
"Now we have to unlock the treasures on this border at the macro level," he said, alluding to a growing economic boon that already nets San Diego billions of dollars in revenue a year, according to studies.
It is on the macro level that most people experience the carnival-esque San Ysidro border, a 24-hour international conga line of 40 million U.S.-bound people and 15 million cars a year. The wait times exercise a subtle but profound effect on cross-border social and economic life.
