EL CENTRO, Calif. — This is the desert, not meant for lush fields and tight cul-de-sacs. But here they are, a few miles from the Mexican border. For a time, this was a thriving place that represented the promise of a new middle-class life, full of hope and optimism.  Work was plentiful when Jesse Aguilar, holding his son, moved to the Imperial Valley. Now jobless, he cannot pay his mortgage.  Parts of El Centro, Calif., have the feel of a ghost town.  Now, some of that hope, too, is drying out in the sun.  For two years, El Centro has struggled with the highest unemployment rate in the country. The latest official figures put it at 28 percent, an improvement from the peak of 32 percent last summer. At unemployment centers, often the most bustling places in town, it is something of a competition to talk about how long a job search has lasted.  Eleven months hardly raises an eyebrow. Two years might draw a little sympathy.  The job losses here began as fewer workers were needed to pluck asparagus and lettuce from the fields. Then the housing boom collapsed, devastating thousands who once had steady construction work. The same two forces have pummeled other cities around the country. But El Centro has taken a third, crippling hit: with tighter security making lines at the border longer each day, restaurants and shops that once relied on Mexican tourists are struggling.  Visitors still come from the other side, from the metropolis of Mexicali to the strip malls and small towns that make up the Imperial Valley, about 100 miles east of San Diego and less than a mile from the border. But there are fewer of them.  Now, many come to collect unemployment checks. After working legally in the United States, they are eligible for the same benefits as any resident, a situation that some say drives up the unemployment rate. It is impossible to know how much, because California does not track those figures. But each month, their checks are delivered to relatives or post office boxes near the border.  “People don’t understand what we learn to live with here,” said Sam Couchman, the director of the Imperial County Workforce Development Office here. Mr. Couchman has spent more than three decades guiding work training programs in the county and said he does not expect the unemployment rate drop to below 20 percent in the next decade. “We have all kinds of up and downs, but it doesn’t send us into a panic. This is the way life is here.”  California’s agricultural heartland has been hit particularly hard in the downturn — 8 of the 10 metro areas with the highest jobless rates are in the state, in central inland cities like Fresno, Modesto and Merced. But the only area that comes close to El Centro’s unemployment rate is Yuma, Ariz., another border town about 55 miles east of here.  “You have someone who is considered a local resident but lives in another country,” Mr. Couchman said. “We don’t have that problem in Fresno. But it also means that we have tens of thousands of people a day visiting us to make purchases and go shopping.”  The county has grown over the last decade, but still has fewer than 200,000 residents. And the local economy has long depended on the other side of the border — “If Mexicali sneezes, we get pneumonia,” people around here like to say. So when tougher security measures at the border came after threats related to terrorism and Mexico’s drug war, businesses here almost immediately felt the pinch. A decade ago, crossing the border was a 20-minute inconvenience. Now the wait in the morning can stretch into a two- or three-hour ordeal.  Carlton Hargrave, the owner of the Family Buffet restaurant in Calexico, the town that hugs the Mexican border, said that since he opened in 1993, the vast majority of customers travel from the other side.  In the last year or so, Mr. Hargrave has laid off more than half of his roughly 40 employees. Most of them live in Mexicali, he said, and few return. “People used to say they were coming to take your jobs,” he said. “Now, we know that’s not true. They are coming to make your jobs.”  Some El Centro neighborhoods look like a ghost town. Downtown is pockmarked with shuttered storefronts and broken signs. But in other areas, the city is more like quintessential suburbia, with cookie-cutter housing tracts and huge parking lots outside big box stores. Border Patrol agents are just as likely to roam the streets as city police officers.
El Centro, Calif., a border town that hosts a substantial amount of Mexican workers, is struggling with high unemployment made worse by tougher immigration security measures.