I grew up around Buffalo, New York and the only thing I ever heard about the American-Canadian border was that it is the longest peaceful undefended border in the world. Americans to my mind do not worry about the Canadian border. It is very important and interesting to me that Canadians (in terms of television executives of the Canadian governments own channel) see Americans as cooperative but contentious in our relationship as it pertains to border security (this also might be because there is some truth to the perception that Americans think rule the world and other variations of American Exceptionalism). This reveals some nuances to American character that are very hard to notice when living in America.

When people mention border security in America, while the specter of 9/11 hangs in the background of their mind, their thoughts generally go to the politics of defending the physical land boundary between the United States and Mexico. People are afraid that they will come and take all of the jobs and force everyone to speak Spanish (irrational fears both). However, the concern over the Mexican border is more of an economic concern not over threats of mass violence. The stereotypes about drug use and violence actually stem from these economic and cultural fears rather than from any real empirical evidence (these fears have in fact through empirical research has shown to be false). But this is what actually constitutes border politics in America. There is little to no depiction of everyday Latin-American living on American television.

Terrorism as it pertains to Muslim immigrants is such an abstract concept that it only is addressed in the form of international politics. There is little depiction (only in the form of news stories and news exposes) of how Muslims live in America and their relation with immigration services and how they cross borders.

I am a little disappointed that you did not address how Muslims in Canada help to develop culture differently than French-Canadians or Anglo-Canadians. This would have giving Americans a different view of how different cultures help to create to culture of a nation-state.

As a last point I would like to return back to the point I made at the beginning of this post that of fictional cultural representations. Armando Iannucci after filming “In The Loop” did an interview with Charlie Rose in which he discussed the way that British Politicians are portrayed as opposed to American politicians. Iannucci referenced a quote by a British politician who has said that he wished that British politicians might be represented on british television as American politicians are on the West Wing as tired heroes. Iannucci said that in England this type of depiction would be laughable because English people have a mind to be inherently critical of their politicians and see them as unimportant people while the power they hold is great (which to my mind as a Politics student maybe due to the fact that they have a parliamentary government and we have a government which has strong executive which lends to more hero worship on our side).

This to my mind is the reason why The office had to be remade in America as people stuck in a dreary existence but make the most of what they have and have small successes while the british office is starkly about the soul sucking of working a cubicle.

These different representations of similar cultural institutions help me to learn a lot of different cultures and help me to put American culture in a broader context.