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Informality Knows No Borders? Perspectives from El Paso-Juarez

A the U.S.-Mexico border, where people breathe the same air, use water from the same sources, and work in integrated economies, some advocate a regional approach to address people’s well-being. All along the 2,000-mile border, a part of Mexico until the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, people cross the border some 47 million times each year to work, shop, and visit relatives.1 International Relations was once wedded to the idea of nation-state analyses, but more recent work that incorporates examples like El Paso-Juárez now examines borders and frontiers as spaces in which to contest sovereignty and organize transnationally.2 Nation-state analysis, with its different policies and regulations, may disguise similarities in people’s work. This paper focuses on the incidence of informal economic activity on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border and raises questions about its continuity under the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA), border militarization, and currency fluctuations, all developments of the late twentieth century. The discourse on informal economies grew out of International Labor Organization (ILO) studies conducted nearly three decades ago in less-industrialized countries. Once termed a sector and dichotomized from the formal economy, informality referred to income-generating activities that tended to escape routine official censuses, taxes, and regulations. Informality also was used to conceptualize small businesses and microenterprises utilizing low technology and a handful of employees or family workers. Informality, people expected, would disappear in a modern, industrial economy, relegated to the shady world of criminality and tax avoidance. Challenges to this approach located informal economies