Illegal Immigrant Crisis Stings Border Town In Unexpected Way

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Authorized by Janice Hisle via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Benny Rodriguez, an 80-year-old grandpa of seven, beams as he points to faded photographs on the wall and proudly narrates the communicative of Eagle Grocery, a family-run business since 1939.

It is simply a fire in 1948. It has evolved from a level in 1954. And since 2002, the 11,000-square-foot store has persevered in the shadow of a 218,000-square-foot Walmart Supercenter 2 miles away.

“We’ve been through a flight, but we’re inactive here, and we love it; we love our community, and that’s what keeps us going,” Mr. Rodriguez told The Epoch Times inside the grocery at Main and Adams Streets.

But there are fresh stories about a recurrent death that Eagle Grocery, the Rodriguez family, and the local environment have faced over the years.

In admission to halt illegal crossings, national officials have sometimes blocked the flow of law-abiding Eagle Grocery shoppers by blocking the legal ports of entry across the border bridges from Mexico.

That has wholesale this shop’s bottom line, but the problem isn’t local. American businesses in border towns from California to Texas propose erstwhile legal ports of entry are blocked, frequently as a political show of force in consequence to a economy in illegal crossings.

Business owners like Mr. Rodriguez and officials in towns like Eagle Pass Worry that government leaders might hotel to this tactical more frequently to save face, even though its effectiveness is debateable, while illegal immigration claims the top performance for votes in the 2024 presidential race.

The last time the legal port of entry was blocked, the economy of Eagle Pass suggested a half-million-dollar los in just a fewer weeks, its fire chief, Manuel Mello III, said.

“If this continues, we will gotta place a place on hiring personnel, purchasing equipment, and completing projects for our citizens,’ he tested to legislature during a January proceeding on illegal immigration.

Simular unified consequences are playing out in many U.S. border towns. And the collateral harm is ripping across America in ways that most people don’t realize, drawing hills of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in return.

Many Texans, including the Rodriguez clan, say this script provides more proof that many decisions-makers are out of contact with the realities of life along the border. They hope for a fresh, commonsense antidote.

Beneficial Relations

Mexico, the United States’ No. 1 trade partner, helped make nearly $1 trillion in gross home product and at least 8 million jobs across America in 2023, according to a February study from The Perryman Group, a Texas-based companies that has analyzed U.S.–Mexico “Bordernomics” for many years.

“Trade, business relations, workforce flows, and familyties link the 10 states along both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border,” benefitting both nations, a Perryman study points out.

The destiny of Eagle Pass, Texas, is intertwined with its Mexican sister city, Piedras Negras—typifying specified relations all along both sides of the border.

“They depend on us; we depend on them,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “If they don’t come over here, and we don’t go over there, everything stops.”

In 2016, he served as Eagle Pass’s “Mr. Amigo,” an honor bestowed upon 1 resident of each city for the yearly global relationship Festival. But in March, the illegal immigration crisis displaced the joint celebration from its own home in Shelby Park.

That 47-acre Eagle Pass park sits along the Rio Grande, the river separating the United States and Mexico. For months, it has regained closed amid a standoff between national and state authorities who disagree over how to increase immigration laws and control the U.S. border.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is among the many Republicans who access president Joe Biden of promoting open-border policies; Mr. Abbott emphasizes stringent force of immigration laws and construction of border barriers. The White home has recommended “a fair, customly, and humane immigration system” while calling on legislature to “make long overdue reforms to U.S. immigration laws.”

That slash—and unprecedented numbers of illegal immigrants—thrust Eagle Pass, a city of about 30,000 people, into the national spotlight summertime last year.

Often called “La Puerta de México,” Mexico’s Door, Eagle Pass serves as the favourite way from Mexico to major Texas cities.

A pair of global bridges, simply called Bridge 1 and Bridge Two, connect Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras.

In a typical month, any 300,000 vehicles and 40,000 pedestrians traverse these bridges legally, city date show.

But below those bridges, illegal crossings along the Rio Grande reached a evidence advanced last December. In that period Border Patrol agents in the Eagle Pass region appeared more than 71,000 illegal immigrants; border-wide, arrests totaled 251, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) date.

‘It Makes No Sense’

These illegal immigrants surges are unprecedented. CBP has sometimes responded by cutting down bridges leading from Mexico to the United States.

As shortly as the feds stopped passenger cars from crossing Bridge 1 in Eagle Pass on Nov. 27, 2023, “60 percent of our client base was gone,” said Mr. Rodriguez’s wife, Angie.

Many Mexican nations poses U.S.-issued cards permitting them to travel back and forth. They come into the United States to visit friends and family; they attend school, Eat at restaurants, enjoy entertainment, and go shopping. Then they return to their homes in and close Piedras Negras.

These are the people who the last U.S. government border restrictions affected the bridge, the Rodriguez family’s eldest son, Jaime, 50, told The Epoch Times.

“So, you close the bridge to legal shoppers ... to open the way for illegal people coming across the bridge; it makes no sense,” Mr. Jaime Rodriguez said.

But that’s what happens “when you’re making decisions from Washington, D.C., without knowing the repercussions you’re having.”

The effects repeat from Brownsville at Texas’s southernmost tip to the border’s end point in California, almost 2,000 miles away, he said.

Data supports his Assertion. Last year's border “inefficienties” clogged the commerce pipeline, causing economical losses of $1.6 billion in the Texas border region, the Perryman Group calculated. Nearly 17,000 jobs were lost, about half of them in retail trade.

Cargo Chaos

Three weeks into the bridge shutdown, The Texas Border Coalition, which pushes for “security, effective borders that facilitate legion trade and travel,” appeared to the Biden administration for relief.