Key Takeaways:
- Aontú and the DUP are demanding internal border checks within the Common Travel Area (CTA), citing immigration vulnerabilities.
- Critics argue these proposals amount to an “Irish sea border for people” and risk undermining the CTA’s original purpose of free movement.
- A more effective approach, experts suggest, is treating the CTA as a single external frontier and coordinating enforcement between Dublin and London.
- Internal enforcement of immigration rights (work, housing, benefits) is growing, but political sensitivities around joint systems remain high.
Calls for Internal Borders Intensify
There is a neat symmetry to complaints from Aontú and the DUP about immigration. Aontú wants the British and Irish governments to implement “an Irish sea border for people” to close what its leader, Peadar Tóibín, describes as “the open back door between both countries.”Gavin Robinson, the DUP leader, believes the open back door is at the Border itself. He called this week for UK immigration officers to check trains and buses entering Northern Ireland from the Republic.
Both leaders have framed their calls as a defence of the Common Travel Area (CTA), saying they want to prevent people exploiting its vulnerabilities. Yet each has focused on a frontier within the CTA, at sea or on land, that happens to suit their republican or unionist perspective.
A Unified External Frontier
When considering immigration, the CTA is better understood and promoted as one frontier around the UK and Ireland. We are increasingly bombarded with stories about the CTA’s failures in this regard but there was rare coverage on Tuesday of a success. The BBC reported that a Canadian man had been detained at Dublin Airport and returned across the Atlantic after attempting to travel to Northern Ireland. He had previously overstayed a UK visa.
Ireland’s Department of Justice told the BBC anyone landing at Dublin intending to travel onwards to the UK must meet the relevant UK immigration requirements. In other words, British law was enforced on entry to the Republic, just as Irish law should be on entry to the UK.
“While US immigration facilities in Ireland are a treasured institution, British facilities would probably be considered provocative.”
Political Ambivalence vs. Schengen-Era Cooperation
There was an unmistakable tone of disapproval in the BBC’s report. Immigration systems are difficult to celebrate, as almost every act of enforcement brings misery for an individual. Promoting the CTA encounters the much deeper challenge of British and Irish ambivalence towards the concept of a shared external frontier.
It is impossible to imagine Dublin and London presenting their co-operation on immigration the way Brussels and EU capitals sell the Schengen zone – as an inspirational exercise in pooled sovereignty, complete with standardised branding for visa stamps and border signs.
Dublin and Shannon airports have US immigration facilities. The UK and France have “juxtaposed borders” at channel ports and train stations, with immigration officers stationed on each other’s soil. These arrangements are not directly comparable to the CTA, as each involves a border between two countries rather than around them, but they still illustrate different attitudes.
Public Unease with Practical Cooperation
While US immigration facilities in Ireland are a treasured institution, British facilities would probably be considered provocative. Polls show strong support in Ireland for more co-operation with Britain on immigration but they also show unease with what that means in practice, such as intelligence sharing, joint policing and co-ordinated laws and policies.
British people can be prickly about France, and French officialdom in particular, yet they fully appreciate the value of juxtaposed borders. They do not always see the value of the CTA, despite the large numbers of Britons travelling to and living in the Republic. Polling evidence shows that if they think of the CTA at all they are likely to see it as a gift to a small neighbour, which they are happy to bestow only if it causes the UK no difficulties.
Internal Enforcement: The Real Frontier
The original purpose of the CTA was to enable British and Irish citizens to travel, live and work in each other’s countries. It is only becoming an immigration system to prevent immigrants availing of it. London and Dublin still much prefer to portray it as a convenience for their citizens rather than a shield.
But this original purpose has also become inseparable from immigration and provides a way to see the issue beyond narrow unionist and republican agendas.
Modern immigration enforcement is increasingly internal, through checks on entitlements to work, rent property and access public services, including social security. The UK’s Home Office already spends two-thirds as much on these checks as it does securing its border.
Ireland has less internal enforcement but has the capacity to develop it quickly through its residence permit card for non-EEA nationals and other systems.
To this extent, the CTA is a frontier throughout the UK and Ireland as well as around them.
The Political Hurdles Ahead
Co-ordinating internal enforcement would be enormously contentious. This can be seen whenever national identity cards are discussed and it becomes apparent the CTA would require compatible British and Irish systems.
Some parties on the left object to ever checking immigration status to access services or claim benefits. The Social Democrats have called it “performative cruelty”. The Green Party of England and Wales has a manifesto pledge to ban it.
But mainstream parties of government should be able to sell an idea of the CTA as a way to regulate immigration while minimising internal borders. They certainly should not let others use it as an excuse to call for harder internal borders on land or at sea.