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Welcome to Crossing the Border, a new limited-run weekly newsletter from The New York Times. Like what you see? Send this newsletter to a friend. If someone forwarded it to you, sign up here to have the next issue delivered to your inbox.

Crossing the border can be done in a rental car, inching northward from, say, the tumult of Tijuana. It can be done on foot, over the walkway that runs in a southern direction from Laredo, Tex., to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. I spent four years as a reporter based in Mexico and two in Arizona, and I’ve stood on stretches of the border with one boot in one country and the companion in the other.

With the border so much in the news these days, and with New York Times correspondents spending so much of their time crisscrossing back and forth, we figured we’d offer readers the chance to spend some time there, too.

Follow along and you’ll get a more nuanced sense of the long line between Mexico and the United States. It’s neither as terrifying nor as trouble free as it’s portrayed.

— MARC LACEY, National editor