Some border theory to chew on...

"Closer critical scrutiny of borders challenges their reification and reveals them as far from simple. Instead, they appear inherently contradictory, problematical, and multifaceted. They are at once gateways and barriers to the "outside world", protective and imprisoning, areas of opportunity and/or insecurity, zones of contact and/or conflict, of co-operation and/or competition, of ambivalent identities and/or aggressive assertion of difference. These apparent dichotomies may alternate with time and place, but - more interestingly - they can coexist simultaneously in the same people, some of whom have to regularly deal not with one state but two."

Anderson and O'Dowd, 1999
From their article "Borders, Border Regions and Territoriality: Contradictory Meanings, Changing Significance".