Largely unremarked amongst the eventually anticlimactic climax of the Commons stages of the Safety of Rwanda Bill this week was one amendment by the Democratic Unionist Party. The proposed New Clause 3 read simply: “The provisions of this Act shall have effect in Northern Ireland, notwithstanding Section 7A of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018.”
The DUP were reportedly concerned that Northern Ireland might become “a safe haven for illegal migration”, because under the arrangements agreed with the European Union, the provisions of the new legislation will not apply to the Province.
Is that concern plausible? On the face of it, it doesn’t seem especially likely. The English Channel poses a particular problem when it comes to border control because the distance between the French coast and the English is so short. Even then, making the journey in the sort of boats furnished by the people smugglers is dangerous.
So the odds of those smugglers investing in the sort of fleet necessary to ship people to County Down, or managing to do so if they were so inclined, is remote.
Yet that obviously isn’t the only means by which this problem could manifest. Were people trying to come to the United Kingdom able to reach Ireland, they would be able to simply cross the land border – we have, after all, at present set aside our ability to police it. Travel between Ireland and the mainland is in any event much easier than most international travel thanks to the Common Travel Area (CTA).
That isn’t an issue right now. But if we are entering what William Hague has called “the age of migration”, we can’t say with any certainty it might not become an issue in the future.
Unlike the logic applied to Northern Ireland during Brexit, the CTA does not mandate hard enforcement of alignment between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. There have been sensible decisions aimed at maintaining it – Ireland is not part of the Schengen free travel area – but present conditions are no guarantee of the future.
At present, the major parties in Dublin are pretty lock-step in support of a liberal approach to immigration, with opposition to it bubbling away on the fringes. Were that to change, however, it isn’t impossible to imagine it suiting some future taoiseach to permit, or even tacitly encourage, the onward movement of immigrants to the UK.
That is understandably of deep concern to unionists. Gavin Robinson, the DUP’s immigration spokesman, told the House of Commons in the debate on the Safety of Rwanda Bill:
“This amendment proposed by us… is important from a principle perspective as a unionist, from a practical perspective as a member of this Parliament who believes that our immigration policy applies equally across the United Kingdom. It always has applied equally across the United Kingdom, and the concern is the Government is blindly ignoring our concerns and allowing a situation to develop that will cause a fracture in the immigration policy which up until this point has applied equally across the United Kingdom.”
A recent report by the Ulster-based Centre for the Union puts its finger on the heart of the problem (my emphasis in bold):
“If the Protocol applies with unabated force, then it will (as with the Acts of Union) subjugate the Illegal Migration Act and Rwanda Bill in so far as they relate to Northern Ireland. This means those in NI will be able to claim greater protections to frustrate the UK’s immigration policy, than those in GB. It risks creating a safe-haven for mass immigration, and more crucially could conceivably lead to a situation whereby this creates a ‘people’ border between NI-GB with infrastructure or checks to prevent the free movement of people within the UK.”
Right now, that proposition might sound slightly outlandish – not least because Northern Ireland is only likely to become a backdoor in the event that we develop an effective solution for the English Channel, which is a long way off yet.
But if the history of the past 25 years have taught us anything, it’s that constitutional problems develop slowly and are not immediately obvious.
In the event that Northern Ireland did become a weak link in the UK’s border security, it is not difficult to imagine a future government preferring to start quietly hiving off Northern Ireland in the manner outlined by the Centre for the Union, rather than taking on much bigger UK-wide battles that might reduce pull factors, such as introducing ID cards or moving to a contributory welfare system.
And in the event that immigration were putting intolerable strain on the Common Travel Area, there would surely be an army of sensibles saying that the pragmatic thing to do would be to leave Northern Ireland on the other side of it. No return to the borders of the past, yeah?
After all, if the Province can be carved out of the British internal market without any apparent change to its “status as part of the United Kingdom” – which the Belfast Agreement is supposed to protect – why should a few mere passports checks at the Larne ferry?