The worlds on either side of the bridges of Laredo across the Rio GrandeRiver are certainly very different. Different types economic specialties, a different sense-of-self internationally, and one's access-to-rights exist on either side of the bridge. Passports or special identification are still needed to undertake the crossing-over from one civilization to the other, but the connections between peoples, families, businesses, and ways-of-life are not as extreme as that witnessed in 1961-1989 Berlin, in today's Ceuta or Melilla surrounded by Morocco, or in pre-1980s China and Hong Kong or Macau. In those towns (and eras), different global ideologies warred with each other at the border.
In contrast, to some great-extent, the immigrant and drug wars, i.e. which we see at the border with Mexico and the USA today, are not ideological but the result of the same dominant global socio-political economic that have been functioning on both sides of the river to a great degree for decades--although a river, fences and bridges divide the towns of Nuevo Laredo and Laredo.
WIDE-OPEN BORDER IMAGERY
The third image of border relationships is the one I experienced when I lived in France, near the city of Basel in Switzerland and the city of Bad Basel in Germany. I call this simply the Open Border image. (I should note that the French town in this 3-country megapolis is named St. Louis. I lived outside of St. Louis in rural Alsace--but only a few kilometers from the Swiss border on a farm.) Crossing over was so fluid in the 1980s, when I lived in this region, that most of the controls and checkpoints had become unmanned. In one incident, I recall simply starting in France by hitching a ride on the back of one farmer's tractor and then crossing over to Switzerland, where I ended up taking a streetcar into a train station before I headed on to Germany.
FEDERALISM & CROSS-NATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS
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