Opinion: The US southern border is not a threat – it’s an opportunity

Editor’s Note: Peter Svarzbein, the son of immigrants and the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, is a visual artist, curator and former two-term El Paso city councilman. CNN — Growing up in El Paso, my family often crossed the southern US border to our sister city of Juarez, Mexico. Republican Chairman James Comer said that he wanted to hold hearings about a crisis “that has turned every town into a border town.” But it’s clear from this statement he doesn’t understand what we know to be true – that our proud border communities show the best of what it means to be American. With roughly 1.5 million people in Juarez and close to 900,000 in El Paso County, this cherished relationship informs so much of what it means to be from our city, where $82 billion worth of trade passed through our ports of entry in 2018, the most recent data available from the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. Utilizing the same art-deco designed streetcars that used to travel between both cities until 1974, it brought back memories for many families on both sides of the border while helping to usher hundreds of millions of dollars of private sector investment, including several new hotels in downtown El Paso since the streetcar opened.