After several years of significant economic expansion and job growth, the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission metro area has slowed down, even below the statewide average, a Dallas Federal Reserve business economist shared with executives on Thursday afternoon at the McAllen Chamber of Commerce. 

“I think it has to do with the close border manufacturing activity between McAllen and Reynosa. What we have seen in the first half of the year was that lots of companies were importing goods from Mexico,” Jesus Cañas, a senior business economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, told the Rio Grande Valley Business Journal. “And they were doing it massively to avoid some of the tariffs. So we had a lot of increase in U.S.-Mexico trade, and the border region benefited from that, from the service [industries].” 

McAllen’s gross domestic product in 2019 was $23 billion. Data shows there was one year of stagnation during 2020. But then there’s been an uptick each year, until GDP hit $30.2 billion in 2023—the most recent year available. 

A key indicator to watch is the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement, known as the USMCA, the next generation of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), which enabled border regions to grow through logistics and trade.