The desert, divided

...Bruce Bracker’s grandparents moved to Nogales and purchased an Army surplus store in 1924. Over time, Bracker’s evolved into one of Ambos Nogales’s best-known department stores, selling tailored men’s clothing, evening dresses, fur coats. (Grijalva purchased his first pair of Levi’s there.) But in the fall of 2017, Bracker shuttered his store... For three generations, Bracker’s business relied on the easy flow of shoppers across Arizona’s southern border. But more restrictive border policies meant his customers couldn’t reach his store anymore. Eighty percent of them came from Mexico, Bracker said, and the other 20 percent earned their income there. The store was 100 percent dependent on Mexico. “We made it through the Depression, but we could not make it through the last eight years,” he said. With more than 300 vacancies, Nogales has some of the most severe port of entry staffing shortages, according to the union that represents Border Patrol agents. The lines to enter the U.S. for a day have become so onerous that shoppers with money to burn are turning to Mexican stores instead, Bracker said. In the Borderlands, commerce goes two ways, a reality that outsiders sometimes miss.
“The commerce coming into the country, the travelers coming into the country through these ports of entry, are really what create economic security in the border states,” said Bracker, who is now a supervisor for Santa Cruz County, in southern Arizona. While the country debates stopping the flow of people across the U.S.-Mexico border, Bracker works to make that flow more efficient. He focused first on renovating ports of entry in Arizona, and now he wants more Border Patrol agents so that more lanes can stay open. But Border Patrol’s staffing troubles create a shortage that’s throttling local commerce.
...The border backup is just one problem that Bracker is wrestling with these days. He and other Borderlands county commissioners have organized a committee to pressure the state to help deal with these issues. Bracker worries about maintaining roads and rerouting traffic when he has the tax base of a rural community and the road traffic of one of the region’s largest overland ports of entry. And road maintenance is absolutely essential: At the height of the busy season, 1,400 trucks per day carry winter vegetables through town. Thousands of eighteen-wheelers rumble down these roads each year, moving produce and supplies both north and south of the border. But Bracker also doesn’t want Mariposa — the Nogales port of entry used by trucks — to lose shipments to Texas or California. Bracker recalled learning of much shorter wait times at other states’ ports of entry and realizing, “We’re gonna get our a--...” He stopped himself, noted that I was recording his words, and tried a different analogy. “Houston, we have a problem.” In 2010, Arizona broke ground on an updated Mariposa port of entry in Nogales. Bracker believes average wait times for trucks have gone down from three or four hours to under one hour, although I could not confirm this, because the Border Patrol does not accurately measure wait times for trucks crossing the border.

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