A horrific knife attack in Belfast has exacerbated tensions which have spilled over into widespread disorder.
Much of the violence has targeted migrants and ethnic minorities. Hadi Alodid, 30, a Sudanese refugee who entered the UK in 2023 via Ireland, has been charged with attempted murder.
Politicians of all stripes have used the attack to raise the need to change the Common Travel Area (CTA) on the basis that it has become a “loophole” in the UK’s immigration regime.
Politicians generally want to be seen offering immediate solutions where issues arise. But here they risk playing into profoundly damaging narratives for societal cohesion, while upending arrangements that thousands rely upon on a daily basis.
What is the Common Travel Area?
The CTA began to operate in 1922, after Ireland’s independence from the UK. Neither country wanted to impose a full immigration regime where people had previously moved freely, especially in the context of managing their new land border. The CTA allows British and Irish citizens to move, live and work freely between the two countries, as well as the Crown dependencies Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.
It has persisted, bar a wartime interruption, ever since. Every day people live in Ireland and work in the UK, and vice versa, and move between these countries using the CTA. There are even some road routes that cross the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland multiple times in a short stretch.
The CTA was intended to operate on both an internal and external level. It provided for unrestricted movement to take place between the parts of the CTA. But this was only achievable because both Ireland and the UK aligned their immigration policy and enforced comparable rules of entry.
Brexit threw these arrangements into uncertainty. Although both countries reaffirmed their commitment to the CTA, challenges loomed. With Brexit, the UK became able to exclude or impose entry requirements on citizens of European Economic Area countries, who Ireland, as an EU state, was obliged to freely admit. It also disrupted the arrangements for return of asylum seekers who moved between these countries, which depended upon EU rules.
An immigration backdoor?
The current tension between the Irish and UK governments is that Alodid was permitted to enter Ireland off a flight from France, and was then able to move across the border. Something might well have gone wrong in this case, but the problem is not a lack of immigration powers.
The UK has a broad range of measures that it can employ to manage the border. By law, it is able to treat any area within a mile of the border as a “border area” for the purposes of immigration checks. The Irish authorities operate similar powers and regularly stop traffic, particularly cross-border bus services, near the border.
UK and Northern Ireland authorities maintain the intelligence programme Operation Gull to police immigration affecting Northern Ireland. But it has focused policing on constraining onward movements into Great Britain. The UK government is reportedly set to “intensify” this work.
Politicians frequently propose new legislation to deal with issues around immigration. Here the problem is not the existence of powers, but of resourcing and policing priorities. These can be harder (and require significant funds) to solve. The more requirements of border checks there are, the more people’s lives will be affected by such checks (including carrying more documentation to be able to prove their right to cross).
Even though immigrants can technically be stopped at the border, the issue is what happens next. There is no formal arrangement between Ireland and the UK to return people who have crossed irregularly (without permission or documentation). This has produced tensions in particular cases, but often suits both governments.
Irregular movements across the border are a “two-way issue”, with many asylum seekers arriving in Ireland coming through the CTA, according to the Irish government. Returner arrangements are complex to administer and efforts to return an individual to a “safe third country” have generated litigation. If there is not a disparity in movements, there is little impetus to set one up. If a disparity emerges, or particular incidents create a political storm, then negotiating such an arrangement becomes more fraught.
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The CTA arrangements do not mean that Northern Ireland is hosting a disproportionate number of refugees in the UK. Northern Ireland has the lowest percentage of ethnic minority inhabitants of any region of the UK, and its population of nearly 2 million includes fewer than 2,400 people receiving asylum seeker support, according to the latest Home Office figures. Due to the nature of the CTA, there is relatively little data available about how many people claim asylum in the UK having crossed the border from Ireland.
Jim Allister, the leader of the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) party, has nonetheless warned of the importation of an “alien culture”.
The circumstances of the initial attack will be exposed in the criminal justice process, but at the moment there is nothing to indicate that this was anything other than an isolated incident. If only we were so fortunate to live in a country where knife crime was alien.
What Northern Ireland does have is a long history of sectarianism and violence. Questions around the border have long been part of this history, and the CTA is bound up in these.
Colin Murray has previously received funding to work on issues related to this post from the Economic and Social Research Council: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FS006214%2F1