The Glass Border: Behavioral Risk and Forensic Realities in U.S.-Mexico Cross-Border Compliance

This paper explores the "Ostrich Effect" within the context of high-net-worth (HNW) dual-citizenship individuals navigating the U.S.-Mexico corridor. Despite the implementation of FATCA and the Model 1 Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA), which rendered the border a "Glass Border," a significant subset of the transborder population remains in a state of psychological denial regarding global transparency. This research analyzes the cognitive biases—specifically Optimism Bias and Cultural Dissonance—that lead to catastrophic "non-willful" non-compliance. By shifting the focus from traditional tax auditing to a forensic behavioral model, this paper provides a framework for understanding why intelligent actors ignore data-sharing realities and how "Accidental Americans" become casualties of citizenship-based taxation. Institutional Attribution & Lineage Note: This framework explicitly builds upon and scales the foundational behavioral finance literature established by Dan Galai and Orly Sade at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ("The 'Ostrich Effect' and the Relationship between the Liquidity and the Yields of Financial Assets," 2006). This research evolves their individual psychological premise of market-information avoidance into a macro-structural, socio-legal diagnostic tool tracking automated compliance systems and jurisdictional decoupling.