But now rising wages in China and a resurgent US auto industry are breathing new life into the maquilas in Tijuana. One of the most booming of border businesses is the aerospace industry.

“People’s perception about what cross-border manufacturing, what maquiladoras are like, is still based upon what was happening in the 70s and maybe the 1980s,” said Kenn Morris, president of Crossborder Group, a San Diego-based market research firm.

Morris said the aerospace industry along Mexico’s north-western border is nothing like the stereotype of overcrowded, low-skilled factories.

“The fact is that a lot of the factories,” he said, listing medical devices, aerospace, and electronics, “they’re building in such a way these days, and they’re managed in such a way, that they can be put anywhere on the planet. But they’re coming to Mexico.”

In the past five to 10 years, more than 50 aerospace and defense companies have started operations in Baja California, according to Mexico’s trade ministry. Most of them are American, and they produce everything from electronic components to steel bolts for commercial and military aircraft.

These companies employ more than 10,000 high-tech workers, many of them engineers, technicians and software developers. The companies choose this region for its proximity to the US and to western ports catering to Asian markets.

But the main reason they come here is simple: the cost of even highly skilled labor is roughly half of what it is in the United States. In San Diego, a senior aerospace engineer makes on average $90,000. In Tijuana, an engineer with similar skills earns $35,000 to $45,000.

Cobham, which produces defense systems, made the move to Tijuana in 1997. Inside its factory, workers dressed in royal blue coveralls sit in groups, looking into microscopes, holding tiny tweezers.

“Over here we do the tuning and testing of the product,” said Javier Urquizo, a plant manager at Cobham. But Urquizo can’t tell me exactly what the product is. That’s classified information.

“So after we finalize the assembly, we need to tweak around some components to get the electrical responses required on the different frequencies,” he said.

The company has to apply for special licenses from the State Department to build those components here in Mexico — that’s to make sure the raw materials and parts and the technology don’t get into the wrong hands.

Teresa Jesus Rio Ramos, a production supervisor here, said that aerospace and defense companies offer the most stable, best paid jobs of all the Tijuana maquilas. She makes around $1,800 a month.

“I think our company is pretty financially stable,” she said, “I don’t have to worry from month to month whether I’ll have a job or not. But that’s not true for all maquilas in Tijuana; people get fired and rehired elsewhere all the time.”

When asked whether she’d prefer working on the other side of the border, where she could potentially double her salary, Rio Ramos shook her head.

I’ve gotten a lot of professional training here in Tijuana, she said. I’m not interested in changing the course of my story.

Lopez has been an agent with Grupo Beta for two decades. It’s a Mexican government agency with a mission to protect northbound migrants from smugglers. The agents had the authority to conduct investigations and make arrests.

Carlos Diaz de Leon walks up to Lopez and extends his hand, showing him a folded US deportation slip. The Sonora migrant has just been sent back to Mexico and he asks Lopez for help.

Diaz de Leon said he’s crossed illegally many times over the years, and Grupo Beta was always there for him.

“They have fed me when I was hungry,” Diaz de Leon said. “They’ve given me change when I needed to call home. I think they’re the only ones out there looking out for undocumented migrants.”

There used to be dozens of local smuggling operations here, charging migrants up to $2,000 a head. Beta agent Mario Lopez said with tightened border security, it’s more difficult to smuggle people across.

“Smuggling has decreased through this part of the border by almost 90 percent,” he said. “Now there’s more surveillance, there’s a second border wall, there are guards patrolling by horse, motorcycle, and cars. And there are cameras and sensors.”

Grupo Beta agent Mario Lopez gets into his signature orange Jeep, during his patrol. (Photo: R. Guidi)

On a typical day, Lopez still patrols along the Mexico side of the border. But he no longer conducts investigations and he’s no longer armed. It’s too dangerous. Now he and his fellow agents focus on handing out food and providing first aid to migrants. Grupo Beta has become a force without much power or much of a mission.

It’s not just Grupo Beta that’s pulled back from investigating. Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana, said that the violence and insecurity have pushed his group to curtail their work.

“It’s too risky to really research the smuggling business of today,” he said. “It was hard enough in the 1980s and 90s.”

In the past year alone, the bodies of more than 150 migrants were discovered in the state of Tamaulipas, 80 miles south of the Texas border. It was one of the worst mass killings in Mexico in the past decade, and it sparked new concerns about the vulnerability of migrants.

Grupo Beta agent, Mario Lopez, stands near the point where the San Diego-Tijuana border fence meet the Pacific Ocean. (Photo: R. Guidi)

Rafael Hernandez heads the volunteer-run Desert Angels, a 14-year old civilian rescue group on the US side. Hernandez fields calls from family members of migrants lost in the desert. He said crossings here may have fallen to a 40-year low. But those who do make the attempt face greater peril.

“Along the way, they are mugged, kidnapped, raped,” he said. “But groups like ours, we can’t point it out. It’s very compromising to say that we know illegal activity is happening somewhere along the border.”

By compromising, he means dangerous. Hernandez said the consequences of speaking out about smuggling or the violence against migrants would be terrible.

The billions spent on border infrastructure and law enforcement over the past decade have dramatically changed the smuggling business. And in many ways, it’s become a much more dangerous game for everyone involved.

Ruxandra Guidi is a reporter at KPBS

On a warm weekday morning, a group of businessmen, residents and a deputy sheriff met for coffee and eggs in the basement of a mosque near downtown Los Angeles. They call themselves the Muslim American Homeland Security Congress; they are locals who want to shape the way counter-terrorism work is done in their community.

On the agenda was an invitation to Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca for Ramadan services. Baca is widely respected here. He founded this group six years ago.

“Someone has to stick their neck out to defend Muslims,” Baca said.

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, Arabs and Muslims around the country have felt the scrutiny of authorities. While many law enforcement agencies have increased surveillance of the Muslim community, Baca has chosen a different approach. Sitting in his office in East LA, surrounded by souvenirs from his travels to Middle East and China, Baca explained his reasons for bringing together the Muslim American Homeland Security Congress.

“We wanted to get ahead of the predictable problems that all counties face in America, and that is, work closely with the immigrant public, which is a very big part of LA.”

Days after 9/11, Baca began reading the Qur’an. He also started meeting with Muslim shop owners and asking them to report hate crimes. He assigned seven Muslim police officers to a Muslim Community Affairs Unit to keep tabs on what happened in mosques and neighborhoods.

“Post 9/11, the business owners who were most concerned about potential backlash were Pakistani-Americans,” he said, adding that the community includes Muslim Americans, Arab immigrants and more. “So my desire was to learn quickly as to how we can multiply our effectiveness in our local county area.”

Meanwhile, the community’s relationship with federal authorities began to deteriorate. Hussam Ayloush, director of CAIR, the Council of American Islamic Relations in Southern California, said Muslims here in LA have felt targeted by the FBI.

“We were seen as ‘prove to us you’re innocent, prove to us you’re good Americans’. And unfortunately, that’s how the FBI started their relationship with Muslims, right after 9/11,” he said.

The FBI’s LA office said it does not investigate people based solely on religious affiliation.

In South Central LA, Imam Abdul Karim Hasan oversees a mosque catering to immigrant and African-American Muslims. Hasan said Baca stands out in his efforts to defend civil rights.

“If one brother commits a crime, you don’t arrest the other brother,” Hasan said. “Everyone is responsible for their own acts. And that’s what makes Baca stand out a little more, I think, than some of the other politicized people.”

Not everyone appreciates Baca’s stance. This March, Baca testified before Congress at hearings examining Muslim radicalization and he found himself on the defensive. Minnesota Republican Congressman Peter Cravaack challenged Sheriff Baca’s association with CAIR—calling the group a terrorist organization.

But back in his L.A. office, Baca defends his work with groups like CAIR. He said his support for the Muslim community stems in part from a curiosity about other cultures.

“Since September 11, I’ve travelled to Muslim nations at their request, and they have paid for my travel. I’ve been to Russian police organizations, Far East police organizations, I’ve been to Pakistan, China, and Turkey,” Baca said. “I think if you want more world peace, you probably should spend less on military and more on public safety.”

Since the Sept.11, 2001 attacks, the government has compiled names of suspected terrorists or people affiliated with them. This terror watch list has grown exponentially in the last decade. But some people, with no terrorist connections, end up on list – and have a hard time finding a way out.

For Shuaib Azizi, it all started in 2007. Azizi is an Afghan-born US citizen; a sharply-dressed and upper middle class real estate broker from a San Diego suburb. He would regularly cross the border from San Diego to Tijuana to show properties to clients.

One day, he was stopped and searched by Border Patrol. Then, it began happening over and over again.

Aziz’s story is straight out of Franz Kafka’s “The Castle” — the story of a man who gets lost in a labyrinth of government bureaucracy to the point where it takes over his life and drives him mad.

“Sometimes they hold me there for as much as six hours,” Azizi said.

He wasn’t given a reason for why he was being stopped, nor which government agency he could turn to for answers. And soon after that, he was being detained at airports, too.

“They would search through everything, my pockets, my body, and take everything out, my wallet, my belt, you name it,” Azizi said. “And then after you sit down you just wait there for hours and hours and hours until you get a clearance from Washington.”

As the problem persisted, Azizi’s relationship with his clients began to suffer. Eventually, a Border Patrol agent hinted to Azizi that his name matched the name of a terrorist suspect in Afghanistan. In desperation, Azizi sent letters of complaint to local, state and federal officials.

Republican Congressman Brian Bilbray received one of Azizi’s letters and began an inquiry. Brian Jones, a liaison with the Homeland Security Department for the congressman, says that the congressman’s office “sent a response back, basically saying that they can’t confirm or deny why he’s being stopped.” Jones continued. “They said they will look into it, and if so, they’d make the necessary changes. After that, I never heard from the congressman’s office again.”

But Azizi did. He received a letter from the Department of Homeland Security, containing what’s known as a Traveller Redress Inquiry number, or TRIP, which he could show to officials next time he was stopped. His new TRIP number would allegedly take care of the problem.

An interview request to the Department of Homeland Security’s TRIP program went unanswered. But the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, which manages the terror watch lists, did have some answers.

An official who asked to remain nameless said that, “99 percent of the people who file a redress form, who believe they are mistakenly on the Terrorist Watchlist, have no connection to the list at all.”

In other words, individuals like Azizi may not even be on the terror watch list.

“You want it to be accurate and complete,” Timothy Healy, director of the Terrorist Screening Center, said on Voice of America in 2009. “It’s a balancing act between private citizens and their concerns, and the safety of the United States, and that’s a balancing act that occurs every day.”

Since 2005 the number of names on the watch list has expanded from 288,000 in 2005 to a million in 2009, according to an audit by the Government Accountability Office.

The ACLU calls the watch list “bloated.” Attorney Sean Riordan of the ACLU’s San Diego office says there’s a major problem with Azizi’s case: if he’s on the list, no one knows why. Therefore, there’s no way to challenge it.

“The government’s vision may be completely unreasonable in that case,” Riordan said. “Yet there’s very little way to even gather information about what’s happening, let alone to try to frontally attack any errors that the government might be making.”

Riordan continued suggesting that security consultants say the terror watch list is riddled with mistakes. But “they say it could be better if it were streamlined and shared between more government agencies, like France and Britain do.”

One recent positive development is that Azizi is no longer being stopped at the border as much as he used to. Congressman Brian Bilbray’s office is taking credit for the change, but in the absence of a transparent process, the real reason is a mystery.

By Ruxandra Guidi

Tijuana crossing (Photo: Ruxandra Guidi)

This port of entry is the busiest in the United States. There are 24 lanes at this crossing. Every day, officers stationed here see up to 40,000 vehicles and inspect close to 90,000 people. De Cima said she spends about half her day inspecting people as they come into the country.

On this day, De Cima zigzags on foot through the traffic arriving from Tijuana. It’s 11 a.m., no longer rush hour, but the rows of cars extend as far as the eye can see.

Suddenly, another agent calls out “915”; that’s code for human smuggling. De Cima rushes past the booths to see if the agents handling the smuggler need backup.

“They got people in the trunk on this one,” De Cima said.

They take the driver out and handcuff him. Then the officers move the beige Honda Accord to an area right under the pedestrian bridge, where they handle drug and human smuggling cases.

“We have four adults in the trunk of this Honda Accord,” De Cima said, “two males and two females. We’ll give them water, we’ll make sure they’re okay.” If not, they’ll call for medical help.

The four Mexicans get out of the trunk, covered in sweat. They’re visibly upset; they look like they might cry, but otherwise they seem to be fine. The four, who are shoeless, sit next to each other on the curb, staring at the ground until the Honda is fully checked.

“You see this everyday,” said De Cima, “people trying to come into the country hidden in the trunks.”

Sometimes they are found hidden deeper in the vehicles, in specially built compartments. “We call them coffin compartments,” she said. “People can’t get out of them.”

Later, the four men and women will be processed and charged, and then sent back to Tijuana. The driver will likely face a human smuggling charge in the US.

De Cima said the work is tiring and challenging, but never boring. “You never know what you’re going to run into. You could run into a person who is armed and dangerous; you could find somebody, a missing person or child who was kidnapped.”

De Cima said she loves her job.

“I do it with a sense of pride for my country,” she said, “and it’s not against anybody. I have family in Mexico, I love the Mexican culture — so that doesn’t take away from the job I do everyday to secure this nation.”

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Tijuana Pa Bailar dance (Photo: Ruxandra Guidi)

Tijuana can’t catch a break. The Mexican border city has been plagued by drug-related murders and kidnappings but things were calming down. Then the violence started up again and now some in Tijuana want to show the rest of the world their city is more than a murder capital. They hope to demonstrate that on Thursday with a mass street performance on both sides of the border. It’s called Pa Bailar, or To Dance, Tijuana. Ruxandra Guidi of KPBS has the story. Download MP3

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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. Looks like Tijuana just can’t catch a break. The Mexican border city’s been plagued by drug-related murders and kidnappings. Things were calming down. President Felipe Calderon even praised Tijuana as a success story in Mexico’s war on drugs. But then the violence started again, not to mention a massive seizure of marijuana at the border this week. Well, now some in Tijuana want to show the rest of the world that their city is more than just a crime headline. Tomorrow, they’ll have a mass street performance on the US-Mexican border. It’s called “Pa Bailar,” or “To Dance, Tijuana.” Ruxandra Guidi of station KPBS has the story.

RUXANDRA GUIDI:  About a dozen women in their forties are gathered in Playas de Tijuana, a place where the border wall meets the westernmost corner of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. Renato Lopez stands in front of them. He’s a 21-year-old college student and one of the organizers of Pa’ Bailar Tijuana. Music blares from a pair of speakers, as Lopez demonstrates some dance steps. The women trail behind, a little off the beat. The song they’re dancing to is by Julieta Venegas, a Tijuana-born pop star, and the steps were choreographed by the Tijuana-based dance troupe, Lux Boreal.

SPEAKING SPANISH

GUIDI: Lopez says the dance moves shouldn’t be hard to learn, a simple four-step and hand motions that say “I love Tijuana.” Gloria Ledon is also practicing her moves at Playas de Tijuana. She’s a 75-year-old dance instructor. She’s one of hundreds of people in the city who say they’ll come out tomorrow, for three and a half minutes, to dance to this song in parks, shopping malls, and plazas. The idea is simple, to celebrate Tijuana.

SPEAKING SPANISH

GUIDI: Ledon says she would love to have Americans who regularly cross into Tijuana join in on the dance on their side of the border. And Norma Pennock agrees.

SPEAKING SPANISH

GUIDI: Pennock says it’s important that people keep coming to Tijuana, because the city has another side to it, a noble city, she says, that provides work, housing and food to anyone who works hard. That’s probably not the image that many Americans have of Tijuana these days. Even though Mexican officials say security is improving here, drug-related killings and kidnappings have captured attention. Speaking at a conference a couple of weeks ago, Mexican president Felipe Calderon championed the current push to clean up the city’s reputation.

SPEAKING SPANISH

FELIPE CALDERON: Tijuana’s efforts at self-improvement are especially important right now, at a time when the country faces a major security problem. Until recently, Tijuana had an image that was almost exclusively linked to crime.

GUIDI:  But that image is hard to shake. Just this week, Mexican authorities seized more than a 100 tons of marijuana at the Tijuana border crossing. And last week came word of seven drug-related killings in three separate incidents. College professor and human rights advocate Victor Clark Alfaro spends his time on both sides of the border. He says Tijuana could use some positive press. But he views a public performance like Pa’ Bailar Tijuana as part of a homegrown effort to take back the streets.

SPEAKING SPANISH

VICTOR CLARK ALFARO: Tijuana residents have seen the worst violence, the most outrageous killings, diminish in the last six months. That doesn’t mean the violence has gone away. But there are important efforts by artists, both as individuals and collectively, to look beyond that and reflect a broader reality.

GUIDI: The dancers in Playas de Tijuana are starting to get the hang of the steps. Elsewhere in the city, hundreds of others are practicing and getting ready for their public performance on October 21^st. In San Diego, people will be dancing at Plaza las Americas, an outlet mall right next to the Tijuana border crossing. No one really knows how many people will participate on either side of the border. The organizers say they’re just hoping to bring people together to celebrate something positive in Tijuana. For The World, I’m Ruxandra Guidi, Tijuana.

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