Building Businesses on the Border: The Bi-National Sustainability Laboratory As an Engine of Economic Change

by Michael Acosta Associate Director, Institute for Policy and Economic Development, University of Texas-El Paso

Imagine the U.S.-Mexican border as the home to advanced, emerging technology businesses with an entrepreneurial spirit akin to Silicon Valley or the Boston Corridor – but with a spicy international flavor and attitude.

These cutting-edge, bi-national enterprises would span the entire length of the border’s 2,000 miles from the Gulf Coast cities of Matamoros/Brownsville to the Pacific Coast cities of Tijuana/San Diego. It would be anchored in the center by advanced aerospace and automotive industrial activities in the Paso del Norte region of West Texas, Southern New Mexico and Northern Chihuahua, with growing nodes of wealth-generating enterprises in such cities as Laredo, Nogales,Mexicali and El Paso.

The intellectual capital generating and supporting these technology enterprises would flow from the regional universities and national research laboratories and centers, working in strategic partnership with the private sector and supported by public policy and programs at the federal, state and local levels.

This is the vision that drives the newly created Bi- National Sustainability Laboratory (BNSL) based in Santa Teresa, New Mexico.

Early history

The BNSL project spans the entire 2,000 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, from the Gulf Coast cities of Matamoros/Brownsville to the Pacific Coast cities of Tijuana/San Diego.

The BNSL was at least five years in the making. In the late 1990s, New Mexico’s Sandia National Laboratory was exploring the concept of applying advanced technologies to economic development, with the goal of reducing political tensions at borders caused by economic disparities. Initial ideas focused on the Middle East, but they quickly determined that the U.S.-Mexico border would be a better focus for their efforts.

They found strong support for the BNSL concept with the U.S.-Mexico Foundation for Science (FUMEC), a binational organization founded in 1992 by U.S. Congressman George E. Brown. Headquartered in Mexico City with an office in Washington, D.C., and a border office at the University of Texas at El Paso, FUMEC’s primary purpose is to promote and support scientific and technological collaboration between Mexico and the United States.

FUMEC had pursued a similar strategy with another binational program, the Materials Corridor Initiative. That initiative focused more narrowly on advanced materials and materials processes for potential economic development opportunities. The five-year, multi-million-dollar program identified 12 deployable materials technologies, two of which actually became start-up companies in the border region at the end of the initiative.

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