ACROSS THE RIO GRANDE, MATAMOROS SNEEZES, WE CATCH COLD

By Juan Montoya

Even as locals decry the high unemployment and depressed economy on this side of the river, a new report by the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) shows that the Matamoros economy – for a number of reasons – has been devatated in the last year and hardly achieved any job growth.

The IMSS revealed that Matamoros, with nealry 750,000 re3sidents, achieved a dismal 1.7 percent job growth. The government statistics indicate that only 1,762 jobs were created in the formal economy despite the glowing reports by economic developers on both side so f the river that the border economy has been buttressed by a return of factories that had fled to China and the Indian subcontinent.

In fact, the Matamoros economy was next to last among the five major Tamaulipas cities in job creation for 2012.

Its report states that Tampico led the six major cities with 9,513 jobs created, Victoria followed with 6,411, Nuevo Laredo was next with 2,704, Reynosa with 2,511, Matamoros and then Cuidad Mante with 281.

The jobs gains for Matamoros are particularly worrysome since it depends heavily on the maquiladoras that employ 51,609 of the 104,863 jobs there. In fact, of the 1,762 new jobs created, 1,136 – all but 626 – were generated by that industry.

This is not particularly good news since that means that there was a miniscule amount of employment generated in the tourism, construction, commerce, services, transportation, agriculture and other areas of the economy.

This not only affects Matamoros itself, but also the Matamoros-Brownsville Metroplex. Were it not for the commercial exchanges between this area containing an estimated population of 136,995 residents – the fourth most populated border region on the US-Mexico border – we on the north side of the river would suffer even higher unemployment rates. Already, the Rio Grfande Valley contains the highest unemployment rates in the state, if not the United States.

Assistant Secretary for Market Access and Compliance Michael Camuñez and others can crow about the continuing importance of the US-Mexico economic relationship saying that just one year ago, in 2011, two-way trade in goods and services between the U.S. and Mexico exceeded a staggering half trillion dollars. Camuñez said that U.S. exports to Mexico totaled close to $200 billion, exceeding exports to Brazil, Russia, India and China combined! According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, approximately 6 million U.S. jobs depend on trade with our southern neighbor.
 In a speech to industrialists, Camuñez said that "more than 20 U.S. states count Mexico as their first or second largest export market, and 28 states did more than $1 billion in trade with Mexico in 2011."

The Obama Administration says that manufacturers in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois and throughout America depend on integrated U.S.-Mexico supply chains to bring components, supplies and finished goods back and forth across the border every day, sustaining millions of jobs in factories around the country. And this doesn’t take into account the nearly 13.5 million Mexican tourists who traveled to the U.S. in 2011 and spent $9.2 billion while they visited here.

This, of course, is a bird's eye view of the entire border region.

What isn't said is that while that multinationals continue to reap the profits of outsourcing in the form of lower labor costs and services in Mexico and elsewhere, the local economies – as we are experiencing here – continue to wallow in stagnation that force Mexicans and others to look north. And while the informal economy provides a slim lifesaver for some Mexican citizens, how many aguas frescas and elote stands can you have in one block? 

So while the U.S. on one hand perpetrates low wages through the maquilas, it also fuels a labor migration north that directly depresses wages along the border and forces migrants and non-migrants alike to leave their places of origin seeking better economic opportunities in northern states.