Just in case you've never been to the opera house in Derby Line, Vermont, it's a building with a special kind of inner space. The opera house sits right on the USA-Canada border. Inside, the performers on stage are technically in Canada, and most of the audience sits in the United States. But in a space dedicated to music, humanity's universal language, a world without borders really does exist.
If it's not "us versus them," it's "us and them."
Prior to the heightened border controls that resulted from last September's WTC and Pentagon attacks, the United States and Canada shared what security officials in both countries proudly referred to as the longest undefended border in the world. And while no armies have ever massed along those thousands of miles of forests, plains, and mountains, in Washington and at border crossings along that line there is a feeling that "we" (the Americans) define ourselves and our national interests differently today than do "they" (the Canadians)—at least on the issue of immigration control.
