The past, present and future of U.S.- Mexican cross-border trucking

Little else in trucking incites the passion of U.S. truck drivers like the issue of cross-border hauling through the land ports in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Bring up the Bush administration’s cross-border trucking demonstration project in any truckstop across the land, and you’re sure to get an earful of opinion from either side of the issue. “They should stay on that side of the border, and we should stay on ours,” says F. Chapman, a Georgia owner-operator leased to Fuller Trucking. “You’re only going to take jobs away from Americans by opening the border to Mexican trucks.” It’s a common view, one promoted by a cohort of groups from the Teamsters union to the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association.

Kevin Robinson, a Tennessee-based company driver for Falcon Transport who has family in the borderlands in Texas, is decidedly less concerned. “It doesn’t matter,” he says of allowing Mexican long-haul trucks and drivers access to the U.S. interior market. “Somebody’s going to bring [freight], and somebody’s going to take [freight].” Robinson notes the interconnectedness of the U.S. and Mexican economies, with the multiplicity of American corporation-owned assembly facilities south of the border, known as maquiladoras and part of a longstanding Mexican government-sponsored program of incentives for assembly plants in the border areas. Car and truck parts and other goods and raw materials cross southbound; new cars, new trucks and other durable goods come back north, feeding into the economic engine of the entire continent.

Roger Creery, executive director of the Laredo Development Foundation, says the cross-border trucking issue’s practical component is in making international trade moved by truck “a little more seamless,” a definite area of interest for trucking, manufacturing and other businesses on both sides of the border.

But, Creery adds, many people have lost sight of that practicality. “Has this become more of an emotional issue than it is an economic issue?” he asks.

With tempers running hot, the cold reality is that, as low participation in the Bush cross-border demonstration project suggested all along, few companies north or south of the border have the on-hand cash and the will to really do cross-border long-haul. The processes and infrastructure in place today for moving loads across the border is likely to remain relatively unchanged for years to come, whether any cross-border program begins anew or not.