Opinion: The San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce needs a leader who understands cross-border relations

On behalf of the Tijuana Chamber of Commerce, I urge the leadership of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce to select for its next president and CEO a person with strong qualifications to support the development of our San Diego-Tijuana binational region. With more than 2,000 members and a tradition of building relationships with its Mexican neighbors, advancing a binational agenda, and promoting a regional identity, the San Diego chamber has been and must continue to be an indispensable player in cultivating the vast potential of the binational region. That role calls for a special set of abilities and experiences in its leader.

For 50 years I have owned a Tijuana business dependent on cross-border conditions. I have been active in Tijuana chamber affairs for 30 years and became chairman in 2022. Our Tijuana Chamber of Commerce serves the interests of 3,500 members, including many with significant involvement in the San Diego economy.

Ideally, the future president and CEO will be conversant with the issues of regulation of trade, immigration, and investment in public and business infrastructure on both sides of the border. Our region has a vital interest in the evolution of supply chains and the development of nearshoring, along with the renegotiation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. They will have regionally rooted binational expertise and experience: a bilingual, bicultural leader embodying the region’s unique identity who has lived and worked at the interface of U.S. and Mexico, building bridges between their economies. The successful candidate will have demonstrated leadership in cross-border collaboration, having played a pivotal role in promoting the region’s cross-border trade and infrastructure. On the U.S. side, the future president and CEO will energetically play a role in the community of entities also engaged in building and sustaining cross-border relations, including but not limited to the San Diego EDC, the Tourism Authority, the Otay Mesa and San Ysidro Chambers of Commerce, Cross Border Xpress (CBX) and the Smart Border Coalition. He or she will have the capacity to provide visionary leadership for a binational mega-region and possess strong regional and national networks of influence and relationships.

This person will fully understand what Tijuana and Baja California are today. Tijuana long ago left behind its old identity as a border town catering to visitors crossing from San Diego. Today it is the second-largest city on the West Coast of North America after Los Angeles and an important global manufacturing hub for medical devices, motor vehicles, audio and video products, and electronic components. Its health sector provides services to “medical tourists” from the U.S. every year. Binational co-manufacturing sees many products crossing the border multiple times in different phases of production. Tijuana has the 16^th-busiest airport in Latin America, accessible to San Diego through the remarkably successful Cross Border Xpress passenger terminal and international port of entry, used by more than 4 million travelers in 2024.

San Diego County and the greater Tijuana area have become interlocked, tightly bound, intensely interactive partners. A prime indicator: on an average day, 148,000 routine border crossers, 54 million per year, come north. In fiscal 2024, more than $69 billion in two-way goods trade flowed through the cargo land port of entry, with the explosive expansion of large commercial building around the port on the U.S. side as a visible testimony to this dynamic.

Jerry Sanders, the San Diego chamber’s former president and CEO, raised the organization’s commitment to partnership with Tijuana and Baja California to an unprecedented level. His successor will benefit from that strong foundation on which to build. With the right combination of strengths, this leader will honor the Sanders legacy by working to further fulfill the bright promise of our extraordinary region.

Palombo is the chairman of the Tijuana Chamber of Commerce and resides in San Diego and Tijuana.