$480 million crossed through Laredo, Texas before most Americans finished their morning coffee today. Not in a month. Not in a week. On an average Tuesday, the Laredo port of entry processes more trade value than the entire GDP of some small nations, making it the single busiest land port in the United States by cargo value.
Meanwhile, 300 miles west, the storefronts on G Avenue in Douglas, Arizona sit half-dark. Plywood where windows used to be. A hardware store that served three generations of families, locked up since 2020. Same border. Completely different fate.
So why does nobody in Washington talk about the difference?
The Border Economy Most Americans Have Never Heard Of
Here is something most people genuinely do not know: the US-Mexico border is not a liability. It is one of the most economically productive corridors on the planet. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, total US-Mexico trade exceeded $798 billion in 2023, the highest figure ever recorded. That is not a rounding error. That is rocket fuel sitting underneath a handful of American cities that most cable news anchors have never visited.
The towns plugged into that pipeline are not just surviving. They are quietly outperforming cities three times their size.
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself where your avocados, your car parts, your flat-screen television actually entered the United States? The answer, more often than not, is a border town you have probably never thought about twice.
Pro Tip: If you invest in logistics or real estate ETFs, Laredo and El Paso metro growth data should already be on your radar. Search the Bureau of Transportation Statistics Border Crossing Entry Data tool at bts.gov, updated quarterly, and filter by port. The throughput numbers will tell you more about your regional supply chain than any evening news segment.
Towns That Are Thriving
Laredo, Texas is the clearest success story on the map. In 2023, Laredo handled approximately $272 billion in total trade, according to BTS data, accounting for roughly 34 percent of all US-Mexico land trade. The city’s unemployment rate sat at 4.1 percent as of Q4 2023, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, close to the national average despite being a predominantly low-income metro for most of its modern history.
The nearshoring wave is a significant part of that story. As American companies pull manufacturing back from Asia and relocate it to northern Mexico, the goods still cross through Texas. Every Toyota plant expansion in Monterrey, every appliance factory in Nuevo León, means more trucks rolling through Laredo. The Maquiladora sector in Mexico grew by over 7 percent in 2023, according to Mexico’s INEGI national statistics agency, and Laredo captures the lion’s share of what crosses northward.
Maria Salcedo, a 44-year-old warehouse operations manager in Laredo, told a story that stuck with me. She started as a dock coordinator in 2009, when the yard was processing around 80 trailer loads a day. Today her facility handles over 200. She hired 14 people in 2023 alone. “We are not waiting for the economy to come to us,” she said. “The economy is already here. We just have to keep up with it.” That is not an economic statistic. That is what a thriving border town looks like from the inside.
El Paso, Texas follows a similar trajectory. The metro area added 11,400 jobs in 2023, according to the Texas Workforce Commission, with logistics, healthcare, and manufacturing leading growth. The University of Texas at El Paso published a 2023 regional economic report noting that El Paso’s GDP growth rate outpaced the national average for the second consecutive year.
McAllen, Texas rounds out the Texas border success corridor. The McAllen-Edinburg-Mission metro saw a 6.2 percent increase in retail sales in 2023, driven in part by cross-border shoppers and a growing logistics workforce. Think of it this way: when Mexico’s middle class grows, the nearest American city is often the first place they shop.
Towns That Are Collapsing
Not every border town won the geographic lottery of sitting on a major trade corridor.
Douglas, Arizona lost its largest private employer, the Phelps Dodge copper smelter, in 1987. It never fully replaced it. The city’s population has declined from a peak of around 20,000 to roughly 16,000 today, per US Census Bureau estimates. Downtown vacancy rates are visually obvious to anyone who drives through. The city budget depends heavily on state transfers. Local retail collapsed further in 2020 and 2021 when COVID-era travel restrictions eliminated the cross-border shoppers who kept G Avenue businesses alive.
Juan Morales ran a family clothing shop on G Avenue for 22 years. He closed in March 2021. Not because he wanted to. Because his customer base, Mexican families who crossed regularly to shop, could not cross anymore, and the local population alone could not sustain the rent. “I waited it out as long as I could,” he said in a 2022 interview with the Douglas Dispatch. “But eventually the math just does not work.” Juan is not an outlier. He is the economic story of Douglas compressed into one sentence.
Are the people making border policy sitting in rooms anywhere near Douglas? The real story behind the headlines is that border security decisions are made primarily with political optics in mind, not with any serious accounting of what they cost small business owners like Juan.
Nogales, Arizona presents a more complicated picture. It is the busiest commercial crossing on the Arizona border and handles a significant share of US produce imports, yet the city itself struggles with poverty rates above 30 percent, per 2022 American Community Survey data, even as billions of dollars roll through its checkpoints annually.
Fast Fact: Approximately 70 percent of all fresh produce imported into the United States between November and May crosses through Nogales, Arizona, according to the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas. That means the price of your winter tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers at your local grocery store is directly connected to how smoothly Nogales is functioning on any given day. When crossing delays spike, so does your grocery bill. This is not abstract border policy. It is the produce aisle.
Del Rio, Texas became national news in 2021 for all the wrong reasons: a migrant surge under the international bridge that dominated television coverage for weeks. What that coverage missed entirely was the economic devastation that followed. Mexican nationals who had shopped regularly in Del Rio stopped crossing when the bridge was temporarily closed. A 2022 report from the Val Verde County Economic Development Corporation estimated local retail sales dropped by 18 percent in Q4 2021 compared to the prior year. Small retailers lost holiday season revenue they never recovered.
Warning: If you see a politician tout border security wins without mentioning commercial crossing throughput times, they are hiding the economic cost from you. Throughput time is the single number that most directly connects border policy to your grocery bill and your regional job market. Ask for it by name.
Here is what this actually means for you: every time a port of entry gets choked down for political reasons, real Americans lose real income, and the costs never appear on any legislator’s press release. This pattern has been documented repeatedly by the Government Accountability Office, most recently in a 2023 report on infrastructure investment gaps at major land ports. And who benefits from you not knowing this?
The border towns that are thriving have one thing in common: they sit on infrastructure that moves commercial goods efficiently, and they have diversified enough to capture the value of what passes through them. The ones collapsing are trapped in a different story, one shaped largely by policy decisions made by people who have never walked those empty storefronts. Understanding the difference matters more than most people realize, especially now that global politics are spiking costs across supply chains in ways that hit border economies first and hardest.
And here is the piece worth sitting with: the same economic forces reshaping border towns are reshaping how money moves everywhere. If you have been watching what delayed financial decisions actually cost in other contexts, the lesson applies here too. Waiting for the perfect policy environment is its own form of loss.
Your Next 3 Steps
The data on US border towns is public, specific, and almost never reported in plain English. Here is how to actually use it.
Go to the BTS Border Crossing Entry Data tool at bts.gov/topics/freight-transportation/border-crossing-entry-data. Search your nearest border crossing or the one that serves your region’s supply chain. Filter by cargo type. The numbers will tell you more about your local economy and your grocery prices than any headline will.
The next time produce prices spike at your grocery store, search “Nogales port of entry wait times” and check whether crossing delays were reported that week. The Fresh Produce Association of the Americas publishes crossing condition updates at freshfrommexico.com. You will start connecting dots that nobody in the news ever connects for you.
If you live within 200 miles of a border metro, pull your county’s median household income against the national average using the Census Bureau QuickFacts tool at data.census.gov. Then find your US House representative’s most recent floor statement on border policy and ask one question: does any of this address commercial throughput, small business retention, or port infrastructure funding? If the answer is no, you now know exactly what they are not telling you.
