In the residential and commercial neighborhoods around the San Ysidro Port of Entry, it can be hard to tell where Mexico stops and the United States starts. Baja California license plates fill parking lots on the U.S. side as shoppers stock up at discount stores and high-end outlets, while cars with California plates head south for weekend frolics or cheaper housing.

On both sides, travelers pull wheeled suitcases, taxis wait to ferry people through heavy traffic, and people with U.S. dollars buy Tijuana-style street tacos chatting in Spanish or ingles.

Billions of dollars cross the border every year in the San Diego-Tijuana region. And on both sides, there are people who wish they could cross la linea, the line, but can’t. Some might wait a few days or hours for the best time to pass through the busiest land port of entry in the western hemisphere. Some might wait — for papers, for amnesty — forever.

Building a wall along 1,000 miles of the southern U.S. border was one of the first campaign promises of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who was in San Diego Friday. Some have called the notion costly, unnecessary or redundant, given technology like drones. Others have called it a security improvement over the current system of interrupted barriers, as well as a more effective barrier against illegal immigration.


1 / 14 Jim Martin has lived at the western end of Monument Road for almost 40 years, and loves the area. He has seen some changes though. (Peggy Peattie) 2 / 14 Rachel Quintana moved her family of nine children from Oakland to a motel in San Ysidro to be closer to the border where she can cross into Tijuana to see her husband, who was deported two years ago. Next to Rachel, Rosalinda Gonzalez, 9, listens to her sister Gabriela, 10, talk about the books she likes to read at school, while a few of the younger children clamber on the windowsill inside their room. (Peggy Peattie) 3 / 14 Angela Alcocer’s produce stand is the last venue for pedestrians before entering Mexico in San Ysidro. She sells fresh organic produce at a discount to people headed for Tijuana, especially children, so they can have fresh fruits and vegetables, which are lower quality and more expensive south of the border, she said. (Peggy Peattie) 4 / 14 Raul Solis of San Diego Beach Rides, feeds the horses early in the morning at the western end of Monument Road underneath the border fence. Solis is originally from Tijuana himself and sends money home to relatives since wages south of the border are so much lower. (Peggy Peattie) 5 / 14 Nyna Devers, 24, has a laugh as she bputs a bridle on Fiona after braiding her mane, before the day’s riders arrive the stables at San Diego Beach Rides on Monument Road. (Peggy Peattie) 6 / 14 Jim Martin keeps a photograph of one of his old cars and the strawberry field he planted when he first moved to the rural community along Monument Road nearly 40 years ago. He planted, weeded and harvested the strawberries himself by hand. (Peggy Peattie) 7 / 14 Two horses battle over a deflated rubber ball in the stables at San Diego Beach Rides on Monument Road just below the border fence. (Peggy Peattie) 8 / 14 Jaime Ornelas, foreground, works on his motorcycle with help from his son-in-law Doug Grigsby in a San Ysidro neighborhood close to the border. (Peggy Peattie) 9 / 14 The end of the trolley line in San Ysidro sees constant pedestrian activity with people coming and going through the Port of Entry. (Peggy Peattie) 10 / 14 A couple of people watchers hang out on the fence outside a fast food restaurant near the trolley station in San Ysidro. (Peggy Peattie) 11 / 14 Because teh exchange rate of currency is constantly changing, people line up to exchange pesos for dollars, or pesos for dollars before crossing back to Mexico. (Peggy Peattie) 12 / 14 The end of the trolley line in San Ysidro sees constant pedestrian activity with people coming and going through the Port of Entry. (Peggy Peattie) 13 / 14 Angela Alcocer’s produce stand is the last venue for pedestrians before entering Mexico in San Ysidro. She sells fresh organic produce at a discount to people headed for Tijuana, especially children, so they can have fresh fruits and vegetables, which are lower quality and more expensive south of the border, she said. (Peggy Peattie) 14 / 14 Nyna Devers gets a high five from her dog as they wait out a rain shower before customers arrive at San Diego Beach Rides. she found him as a lost puppy in the Tijuana Estuary. (Peggy Peattie)

For people living in southern San Ysidro and Tijuana’s northern Zona Norte, which runs parallel to the fences south of San Ysidro, a wall is not just a hypothesis.

The first chain link fence between them went up in the 1950s, and it was later upgraded to recycled military landing pads. In 1994, Operation Gatekeeper, federal legislation aimed at stopping illegal immigration, authorized more fencing, and in 2006 another fence project was approved through the Secure Fence Act. Today, the U.S. border in San Diego has the distinction of having not one but three fences in some sections of the border, through a 1996 law.

“It crosses party lines and it crosses administrations,” said Alejandra Castaeda, an immigration policy scholar with El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, said of the fence growth.


What, if anything, did dropping a fence between neighborhoods that in a sense grew up together — that were once accessible by foot, and that are still closely interconnected but also feel in some ways like they’re a world apart — change?

SERIES: THE BORDER WALL

“It completely impacted the irregular crossings,” sending people east, to the desert, Castaeda said. They began using the same routes as drug traffickers, which made their trips much more dangerous, she said.

She named another consequence. “Before the wall was built, the flow was easier. People just went back and forth.” Afterward, people picked a side and stayed there, since it was harder to cross.


Ev Meade, director of University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute, said the fences are to a certain degree understandable, but their costs should not be dismissed.

“It’s not that there’s no logic to have a fence in particular areas,” Meade said. “If you go back and you interview people or you look at the way undocumented immigration happened in San Diego in the 1980s and 1990s, there were people running across (Interstate) 5, there were people going across people’s back yards and alleys in Chula Vista and even as far up as Temecula.”

Net immigration from the south didn’t drop after Operation Gatekeeper, because the flow of unauthorized migrants moved east. It started dropping in 2000. Meade said that was because of Mexico’s improved economy, the end of a migration cycle between Mexico and the United States, a falling birthrate and aging population in Mexico, and negative factors like the drug wars.

A report published in April by the Congressional Research Service said, however, that the greater security measures by U.S. Customs and Border Protection likely played a role.


“Disentangling the effects of enforcement from other factors influencing migration flows is particularly difficult in the current case because many of the most significant new enforcement efforts — including a sizeable share of new border enforcement personnel, most border fencing, new enforcement practices at the border, and many of the new migration enforcement measures within the United States —all have occurred at the same time as the most severe recession since the 1930s. Nonetheless, the drop in recidivism rates suggests that an increasing proportion of migrants are being deterred by CBP’s enforcement efforts,” the report stated.

North and south of San Ysidro’s border, people said the fences cut violence in their neighborhoods. Among them is Faustino Guerrero, who has lived in Tijuana’s Zona Norte for 30 years. “Before, it was quite rough, with all the people here, because they were coming from all over the republic. It was full of conflict, frankly,” he said.

People also said they were aware of other factors affecting migration more than the fence.

“What has been the most effective thing has been the recession and then the actual enforcement at the border,” said Genaro Valladolid, a commercial real estate agent in Tijuana. “The wall, people can get over it and under it. … My opinion is the wall is just a physical impediment that doesn’t really do much.”


One thing is clear: As the border west of the San Ysidro Port of Entry became tougher to breach, both San Ysidro and the neighborhood that mirrors it to the south saw fewer migrants. For people on both sides there has been a human cost to the fences, as families were divided and risks for migrant border crossers became greater.

What changed: North

In 2004, a decade after Operation Gatekeeper was launched, the urban landscape a few yards to the north of the fences in San Ysidro was transformed.

“You have shopping centers and housing developments right next to the border, and it was impossible for that to have happened in the pre-Gatekeeper environment,” Jeffrey Passel, a researcher with the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan economic and social policy research organization in Washington, D.C., told the Union-Tribune in 2004.

Meade said the economic growth was not a byproduct of the wall. “Regional growth happened despite the border build-up, not as a result of it, and the human cost of the border fence is totally unjustified,” he said.


A few miles west of San Ysidro’s dense commercial zone and the border crossing, the vibe was serene on a gusty May morning. Jim Martin bought a ranch there 39 years ago, paying $35,000 for five acres.

Before the fences, Martin would cross easily into Mexico and back.

“At the end of the day, we’d saddle up our horses and ride into Mexico, without no fence. Have a few beers. Sometimes we’d pay the kids a little bit of money to watch our horses,” Martin said. “There was no fence. You could ride right through this canyon.”

When he first moved there, in the 1970s, the human traffic was relentless, he said.


“I’d see two or three hundred a day. A day!” Martin said, speaking of undocumented migrants heading north. Martin said smugglers and border agents alike mistreated the migrants. Martin said he caught a smuggler trying to rape a little girl. He also claimed he witnessed drug trafficking, once involving a federal agent. That happened at least 20 years ago, he said.

The most obvious impact of the fences was that they cut the northbound human traffic significantly — but not immediately. The Imperial Beach and Chula Vista Border Patrol stations saw a 94 percent drop in apprehensions between fiscal 1993 and fiscal 2004 — from 321,560 to 19,035, according to a 2007 congressional report on the San Diego fence, which noted that more manpower, more underground sensors and a bigger vehicle fleet contributed.

The report also found that “apprehensions remained stable during the early 1990s in the San Diego sector despite the construction of the ‘primary’ fence in 1993.” Only after the triple fence went up did the flow drop, starting in the late 1990s.

Jaime Ornelas, who used to live not far from Martin’s ranch, noticed a drop in migrant traffic after the fences went up. People used to come through his property at night, followed by what he called Homeland Security officers. Both would cross, unwelcomed, into people’s backyards, he said.


He later moved to Coral Gate, a short drive east in San Ysidro, which has nice single-family homes and mature trees on curving streets. The border is about 500 feet south, but it’s rarely visible because a thick wall encircles the community. Its homes were built after Operation Gatekeeper, in 2001.

What changed: South

Directly south of Coral Gate is Tijuana’s Zona Norte, a gritty but gentrifying area that contains the city’s red-light district. On a recent afternoon, Tom Zarate was sitting on the steps outside a migrant shelter, visiting friends there.

When he was a boy in Tijuana, crossing the border was fun and easy, he said. “I remember when it used to be chicken fence,” he said. “When we were kids, we could go across the border and explore. And the Border Patrol, they were different than now. They would buy us, like, cheeseburgers, and give us a dollar for the bus, and they were good people.”

To get north, he’d pass through “greens, hedges, bushes,” he said. One time, the trip was lethal. “Across the border there was “a beautiful lagoon.” One of his friends tried to cross it and drowned. “That was tragic,” Zarate said.


From where he was sitting, the southernmost fence was maybe 50 yards away. The U.S, he said, feels “pretty close, and yet so far.”

His English is as good as anything you’d expect for a graduate of Torrey Pines High School, which he attended as an unauthorized immigrant. After 25 years in the U.S., he was deported.

For Zona Norte, the fence “changed completely, everything. There’s a lot less crime. Remember there used to be a lot of deaths? A lot of people who died, trying to get over to the other side.”

Zarate brought up Trump’s wall, which he compared with the Great Wall of China. “I don’t blame them, because there’s been, ever since we were kids, a lot of smuggling. A lot of drugs and undocumented people,” Zarate said.


Sitting at a desk inside the shelter, Marco Antonio Gonzalez, a temporary manager of the property who was deported 13 years ago, agreed that a wall makes sense. “It’s a good thing. Trying to keep the drugs and the violence away from the U.S.,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez wants to reunite with his mother and sister in the United States. But he’s waiting to reenter legally, especially because he doesn’t want to get them in trouble.

“I never jumped the fence to go over there,” he said. “I just went over there with my student ID, and they let me pass.”

Other barriers

Terrorism. The economy. Those are some of the macro forces that may be more effective than any physical barrier at drawing a line between nations and keeping people on their own side of the border.


Esther Solis, a Tijuana real estate agent, said the Zona Norte is changing fast. Newly paved streets, fresh paint jobs, buffed up police presence and other improvements are attracting investors. The streets run in a grid there, and when you face north, you get the same view: the fence and the U.S. behind it.

A Border Patrol truck was slowly driving east on an access road behind the fence as she described the changing neighborhood. Does that kind of sight make an impression?

“We’re indifferent to them, because we’re used to it. We’ve lived with immigration authorities since forever. Before, they used to be more familiar. There was a different vibe to them. After 9/11, they withdrew.”

If anything changed the neighborhood and Tijuana more broadly, it was 9/11, which led to tighter border controls, Solis said. Deported El Salvadoran gang members also created trouble in Tijuana — also after 9/11, she said.


“The fence didn’t affect us,” she said.

Even as the physical border between ports of entry has become more impermeable, the region’s binational economy has swelled, with increasing amounts of money and goods flowing both ways. Sentri lanes have cut border wait times for commuters. Trade agreements are uniting the Baja California and U.S. economies, Meade said.

But for Angela Alcocer, the physical buildup of the border is irrelevant. Economic and health barriers are the problem. Just before the pedestrian entrance to Tijuana, Alcocer sells organic fruit at discounted prices.

Baskets of fruit are $1 — cherries, currently her best-sellers, are the exception, at $2 a basket.


“For us, the exchange rate is the bigger problem,” she said in Spanish. The peso has fallen 20 percent in the past year. Mexico agricultural output is massive, yet Alcocer sells blackberries, their boxes marked “made in Mexico,” to southbound shoppers — who will bring them back into Mexico.

Prices are higher south of the border, she said, because companies ship produce north, and only a surplus stays in Mexico.

Rachel Quintana wants to see the fence come down. But for her, immigration policy, not the wall, is the obstacle. Quintana, 37, lives in San Ysidro with nine of her 12 children, in an apartment that is one of the closest residential addresses to the border crossing. South of that is the Jack in the Box, the McDonald’s, then a few stores, then Mexico.

Whenever she can steal a few seconds, she stands by her door and looks south. “My husband is right there, by the antennas,” she said, looking toward a hillside in Tijuana darkened with houses. She hung a red curtain in her window, in hopes that he might see her. She can’t go south because of logistical challenges — no car, no passports for her children, and no one to babysit — and he can’t come north because he was deported.


For Quintana, Mexico is at once so close and so far.

Three miles west, Heather Brown works as a wrangler at a horse ranch. She takes people on beach rides, where proposals are special events. Even rarer are “illegals,” which she’s spotted three times in two years, looking, she said, more scared than she was.

“They see you, and their eyes get really big, and then they run the other,” she said.

From the counter where she greets customers, she can see the fence. At that distance, a few hundred yards away, it’s a thin line scratched into the side of the dusty hills.


“It’s just a fence that separates an entire culture. It’s like a whole ’nother world, and it’s just a little metal fence that separates it,” she said. “It’s kind of mind-boggling.”

Brown said the cities’ governments, rules, languages and societies are very different. But so close. “I mean, If you stand at the end of our driveway, if you’re pretty good with a golf ball, you might be able to almost make it over there,” she said.

Popescu is a San Diego freelance writer.