Although reliable figures are hard to come by, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center estimates that some 230,000 Mexicans have fled the violence, about half of them to the United States. While illegal immigration to the United States has dropped over all by about 80 percent from the mid-2000s because of tougher enforcement and the effects of the recession, border cities have seen a contrary phenomenon. Since 2009, according to the Census, the El Paso metropolitan area’s population has grown to around 800,000 residents, up by 50,000, an undetermined but significant percentage of them coming from Juárez. Some have sneaked across the river and are thus difficult to count. Many others, however, have made the trip legally, at least initially, coming over the Rio Grande bridges on border-crossing cards — the short-term visas are easy to overstay — or via a program that offers green cards to foreign investors and their families, as long as they create at least 10 jobs.

José Yanar opened a furniture store called Designer World on Texas Avenue, just off Interstate 10. He and his son both work there, coordinating orders with the family’s factory, six miles away in Juárez, which they hadn’t visited in 18 months. I visited Designer World one day and found the elder Yanar — a bluff, barrel-chested boss nicknamed Pelón (Baldy) by his employees — in an office next to the showroom, where he was keeping watch over the factory on a large flat-screen television that was divided into 16 quadrants, each of which was streaming a jerky feed from a closed-circuit camera. Periodically one of his several phones would screech, and José would carry on his daily business in Spanish with the walkie-talkie voice of a factory manager.

“The people that I have there working for me, they’re very loyal, and of course I pay them a little bit more,” José said. Still, running a business from afar involves all sorts of annoying inefficiencies. He was afraid to set foot in Juárez, but not all of his managers had U.S. visas. So when he had to see them in person, he sometimes conducted meetings at the center of a border bridge, in the buffer zone beneath the Mexican and American flags.

After José escaped his kidnappers, the whole family crowded in with a sister-in-law who already lived in El Paso, and they put their place in Juárez on the market. “I still hope I can sell it,” he said. “But every single house in Juárez is for sale.” Compared with what others were going through, though, these were minor hardships. Yanar purchased a house in El Paso, and soon he found his neighborhood was full of people he knew from the other side. His social life picked up. He didn’t have to worry about his kids sneaking back into Juárez, because most of their friends had moved, too.

“In the beginning, it was very hard,” Yanar said. “Now I’m getting used to it.” One evening, José and his wife, Clarissa, had me over for dinner. Pepé was there, along with his two younger sisters and his girlfriend, Ana, another Juárez transplant, who moved over after her uncle was killed. Their new place is a classic Texas ranch house, with exposed wood beams and a pool out back. Clarissa, who wears fashionable glasses and speaks English without a trace of an accent, spent part of her childhood in El Paso, where her family ran a Spanish-language movie house. The Yanars told me they always considered themselves proud citizens of Juárez. “The Mexicans that have a lot of time in the U.S. . . . they think they’re gringos,” José said dismissively. But now they are trying to figure out where they fit.

From the kitchen, someone piped up with the day’s news: the political authorities had proposed to change the name of their hometown to Heroica Ciudad Juárez — adding the word “heroic,” as if the appellation could make it true. There was a chorus of scoffing.

“Never mind,” Ana said. “We’re not from Juárez anymore.”

Sometimes I wonder what El Paso lives off of,” says Tony Payan, a professor of political science at UTEP. To a large extent, the answer is that it subsists off of Juárez. There’s no real agriculture in its arid climate, and much of the city’s once-significant industrial sector has closed down or moved away. El Paso’s income and education levels have long been far below the national average. For the last few decades, the city’s prosperity has been tied to production in the maquiladoras, the outsourced manufacturing industry across the border, and to public-sector employment in border security, law enforcement and at the fast-growing Army base at Fort Bliss — institutions that are all there, to one degree or another, because of the city’s proximity to Mexico. Then, of course, there’s the hidden economy of the narcotics trade, which generates anywhere between $6 billion and $36 billion a year, depending on whose estimates you credit.