The San Ysidro Crossing: Eighty-Seven Thousand a Day

Every day, roughly eighty-seven thousand people pass through the San Ysidro Port of Entry, including forty-one thousand personal vehicles and nineteen thousand five hundred pedestrians. San Ysidro is the busiest land border crossing in the Western Hemisphere and the fourth busiest in the world. The current facility was built in nineteen seventy-three, though a crossing has existed here in some form since the early twentieth century.

Stand at this crossing and consider the geography. The first California mission is about fifteen miles north of here. The Kumeyaay's traditional coastal fishing grounds begin essentially at this line. The United States-Mexico border bisects a human geography that has operated continuously for twelve thousand years, most of which predate the border's existence in eighteen forty-eight. The political boundary is one hundred seventy-eight years old. The human corridor it runs through is ancient.

Eighty-seven thousand people a day move through this point under conditions that vary enormously depending on which direction they are traveling, which documents they carry, and how their faces match the categories that federal border management has constructed. On a busy day, the wait to cross northbound into the United States can exceed three hours. Crossing southbound typically takes minutes. The asymmetry is built into the infrastructure.

The community of San Ysidro on the United States side and the city of Tijuana on the Mexican side function as a binational metropolis connected by these lanes. Tijuana's economy is substantially organized around the crossing: its hospitals, its pharmacies, its markets, and its labor force all engage daily with the United States side. The crossing is a seam in what would otherwise be a continuous urban fabric. The seam happens to be the most trafficked land border crossing on the planet.