The real crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border

Just ask Blanca Gallardo, 45, or her colleague Ivan Caballero, 39, two of the three workers left at La Familia, a mega-discount store in the border city of Nogales, Ariz. The store once employed 24 people. La Familia occupies a prime piece of real estate on Morley Avenue, Nogales’s Main Street. Like other retail businesses on and around this thoroughfare, La Familia depends almost entirely on shoppers who live on the other side of the border fence a short walk away — Mexicans who have not been allowed to enter the United States since March last year, when land ports of entry were closed to visa-carrying nonessential travelers in an effort to contain the coronavirus pandemic.