Ken Larriva, who owns a number of retail stores on the American side, said that 90 percent of his customers were maquiladora workers -- when they had work.
"People are not walking through the doors like they did before," Larriva said in an interview. "We should open our doors in the morning and people should come in freely, but it's not happening."
Twenty-nine plants on the Mexican side have shut their doors or cut back operations in the last year, almost one-quarter of the total. A work force that was 38,000 strong a year ago has lost 12,000 jobs.
Nogales, Ariz., gets two-thirds of its sales tax revenue -- its only source of income -- from Mexican shoppers' purchases.
Fox has said he still has hopes that the maquiladora system will recover as the United States emerges from recession. He is also pushing southern Mexico, where wages are still very low, as a factory site for companies who find the border area too costly. But he has had little success in drawing multinationals to locate there so far.
As for the idle maquiladora workers, Susan Clark Morales, who owns a ranch in Nogales, Arizona, that abuts about 13km of the border, predicts that they will move north, not south, in search of jobs. She said she had seen a drastic increase in the number of immigrants crossing her ranch.
"If you were 2 miles away from an opportunity to work, why would you turn around and go 400 miles?" she said.
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