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8 / That Long Western Border Canada, the United States, and a Century of Economic Change carl abbott At the start of the twenty-first century, according to the pundits of newspaper opinion pages, international borders were fast becoming relics. Germany and Italy had become members of the same European Union. Guest workers crossed and recrossed the borders of Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Transnational corporations sought workers and investments across dozens of national divides. Global financiers shifted wealth around the world with a few strokes on the computer keypad. The northwest quadrant of North America has heard the same message. nafta followed the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement. Shoppers flow back and forth from one country to the other depending on bargains and exchange rates, while tourist bureaus target cross-border recreationists. Competing for attention are new regional designations that span the long western border—the countercultural Ecotopia, the scholarly suggestions of a Great Raincoast, the recent idea of a sustainable Cascadia.1 This chapter offers a critical historical perspective on this vision of a unified Northwest. The stance is one of cautious skepticism. Despite the attractions of a Cascadian vision, I propose the counterintuitive suggestion that the national border actually divided the Northwest more thoroughly at the end of the twentieth century than it did at the beginning. Webs of regulations and layers of public bureaucracies now belie its physical openness. In the nineteenth century life in the old Northwest reflected the international age of mobility. At the century’s end, however, the new Northwest was deeply enmeshed in the global age of bureaucracy. 203 I begin this historical reflection on the economic and social implications of the border between the United States and Canada by casting some anchors into the firm ground of western literature. Wallace Stegner, one of the premier writers of the American West, remembered a childhood just north of the forty-ninth parallel in his memoir of the 1910s, Wolf Willow. It recounts Stegner’s eloquent return to his early years and the sun-drenched plains of the continental dry-farming frontier. The family had already tried Seattle, Bellingham, and Iowa before arriving in Canada, and they would eventually move on again to Montana: “Our homestead lay south of here, right on the Saskatchewan-Montana border—a place so ambiguous in its a‹liations that we felt as uncertain as the drainage about which way to flow. . . . Our lives slopped over the international boundary every summer day. Our plowshares bit into Montana sod every time we made the turn at the south end of the field. . . . We bought supplies in Harlem or Chinook. . . . In the fall we hauled our wheat, if we had made any, freely and I suppose illegally across to the Milk River towns and sold it where it was handiest to sell it.”2 In the summer the family sent its mail orders to Sears. In the winter it moved a few miles north to a small Saskatchewan town, where new school clothes came from the T. Eaton’s catalog. My second text comes from a novel set in the 1970s—a decade of crucial change for the United States and its global systems of economic and political interaction. The novel is Yellowfish, one of the fictional meditations on the tensions between western landscapes and the institutions of modernity that Washingtonian John Keeble wraps so effectively in the guise of a crossborder thriller.3 AredDatsun . . .whippedoff [SanFrancisco’s]WashingtonStreetintotheparking lot next to the Golden Phoenix restaurant. . . . Wesley Erks . . . leaned around and rapped on the rear window. . . . Three Chinese youths stepped out. . . . [They] had about them a singular air of attention , receptivity, uncertain curiosity, the air of travelers, which is what they were, who have reached their destination, which they had, a place to which they have never before been, a strange place. . . . The youths—he knew—were illegal aliens. That was why [he] had been hired. They entered Canada on tourist visas. He had driven them across the border at an unchecked point. . . . Johnson’s Immigration Act had attempted to regularize immigration. . . . It granted twenty thousand visas each year to each independent nation, but 204 carl abbott counted Hong Kong as part of Great Britain, and thereby reenacted, strangely, the “paper sons” and “uncles” entering surreptitiously from the north. The contrast between Keeble’s West and that of Stegner is a signpost for thinking about the ways in which the U.S.-Canadian border has affected the two overlapping economies of...

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