What a Town Split Between Belgium and the Netherlands Can Teach the U.S.-Mexico Border

At the Association for Borderlands Studies' 50th-anniversary conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Ricardo Ferreira told us the story of Baarle over dinner. Many of you will know it well. What struck me, as someone who works on the U.S.-Mexico border, was how directly it spoke to what we're missing in North America.

That story became the anchor of a recent op-ed I wrote comparing Baarle's institutional approach to the reality at the U.S.-Mexico border, where a single truck crossing in Laredo, Texas, moves through five overlapping regulatory systems in 20 minutes. Baarle merged fire departments, shares a police station, and holds joint municipal sessions. The U.S.-Mexico border processes $400 billion in annual trade but still lacks comparable binational institutional architecture.

The full piece is here: https://thebridgedc.substack.com/p/four-apartments-two-countries-and

I direct a border research center in Laredo, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border. The challenges are different from those in Europe, but the core question is the same: once the line is drawn, how do you build institutions that work across it? I'd love to learn from what's working on your side of the Atlantic.