According to ElDiario.mx, El Paso lost 750 jobs in the last four months of 2025. Juarez lost 17,000 maquila jobs in all of 2025.
That employment contraction will run through our local economy. A lot of little businesses will close, and then their suppliers will suffer, and maybe lay off some people, and everyone will tighten their belts and eat cereal for dinner.
The big chains will survive. They can afford an economic downturn. They’ll just wait till the recovery, or adapt to the smaller economy.
But it’s the small businesses that make El Paso special. The mom-and-pops. The holes-in-the-wall. The labors of love that some people undertake as a service to the community. And those small businesses will die first.
Like Literarity, that little bookstore on Mesa. They just announced they’re closing after nine years.
I think we can lay a lot of blame on the City’s misguided economic development policy. We spent a billion dollars on Quality of Life projects, and what did we get for it? Triple A baseball?
Crumbling streets?
Higher taxes?
Fortunately, El Paso relies heavily on government, and government is showing no economic downturn.
Yet.
See if you can find any comfort in that thought.
No, Rich, I’m afraid I find no comfort in that thought. We do indeed rely on smart decisions from our elected representatives, but it has been a long, long time since any of them made a smart decision. I would think that before a smart decision could be made from them, they would need to face the reality of stagnant growth being our condition, and simply accept that. It is really OK if we stop growing as a city, you know. It is just like a wise man once told me: Learn to be content with what you have got. Short and simple. Maybe if we could just do the best with what we’ve got, we could stop reaching for the unreachable, and concentrate on true quality of life. Fix the damn streets already!