Control? It's a border nightmare

Nine months ago the transition period ended. EU law no longer applied and Brexit was made into a firm reality. After all the promises in the campaign and the great weight placed upon it during the negotiations, the supposed triumph was now in our hands. A whole vista of new powers and possibilities now opened up before us - we had finally 'taken back control of our borders'. 

So if we have all the control, why are our borders such a nightmare?

Winding queues are now a regular feature, for both humans and lorries. A combination of new customs checks (which have yet to really start to bite) and shortages of workers from the EU mean the problem has become so acute that a growing number of goods are now in short supply - from chicken to construction materials. Entering the country as an individual meanwhile, in a process exacerbated by the haphazard imposition of COVID controls, is a seemingly random ordeal - checks might be almost absent or it could be an agonising wait as you try and present multiple different documents to a variety of officials.

We can set any policies we want at the border, and these policies have been regularly in flux as a result of both leaving the EU and managing the pandemic, but we seem unable to design a system that actually gives us the outcomes we want. Have we missed something? After all, we have control now, right? Any and everything that we want in terms of border policy should be ours - that is what was promised. Surely there must be a clever trick that we should be using? 

Unfortunately not. There is nothing more to this than another Brexit fantasy crashing ashore on the rocky edges of reality. 

The source of the problem is how 'the border' (and its subsequent 'control') has been conceived in the minds of politicians and sold to the public. It has been constructed as a series of discrete switches on a great dashboard, all of which can be flicked one way or another with relative ease. UK nationals entering? Flick that switch to 'easy'. Asylum seekers? Better put that one on 'hard'. Skilled EU nationals? Easy. Low-skilled EU nationals? Hard. Goods from our neighbours produced to high standards? Easy. Goods from free trade partners around the world? Easy. Goods from jurisdictions we're less sure about? Hard.

And if any situation ever changed, for example, if we suddenly realised we needed a lot more 'low-skilled' EU workers in particular industries, it would be nothing more than the flick of a switch and the problem would be solved. After all, we would have control - all we needed was to repatriate the whole machine to Westminster and put some true believers in charge.  

And yet, the border machine is not so straightforward, nor so simple in its operation.

Take the asylum seekers switch, for example. It turns out that you can flick it back and forth over and over, with endless declarations on clamping down on people crossing the Channel to reach the UK by irregular means, but that very little actually happens until France also matches the switch on their side of the border.  Even then, it's hardly a guarantee that irregular crossings will actually stop entirely and come down to zero. Many switches on the dashboard fit this type - policies which must be synchronised with other countries and the wishes of other electorates before they will have any impact. Unilateralism, meanwhile, is certain to fail if reducing the number of crossing is what you actually want and doubling down on this rhetoric, poisoning relationships with other countries, will only make it worse and make us more impotent in these circumstances. 

In other cases, even good relations with other countries are not enough. Much as we may want certain goods to easily flow in, their respective switches in the open position, while others are kept out, it is not so easy to separate out all the various countries of origin and their different methods of arrival. Processes can be designed to filter out arriving goods into different lanes and speed up the process but sometimes it is simply the case that arriving goods are either subject to checks or they are not. Even an advanced, smart customs border system cannot be as frictionless as an absence of customs checks in their entirety. We can push as hard as we want, but these switches will remain jammed only partway up. 

Finally other switches operate in unison, no matter how much sections of our politics would wish they could be separated. Trying to be open and welcoming to the 'good' immigrants while being closed and hostile to the 'bad' ones is typically doomed to failure. Migrants, of any skill level, can see how other migrants are treated and it is naive to think that they would simply dismiss the situation when ugly and threatening language is commonly used against the 'wrong kind' of migrant. They know how thin the line is between the 'good' and the 'bad' in public imagination and how quickly sentiments can change. Importantly they know that on the street or online, few people will check your qualifications before subjecting you to abuse and hate crimes. A hostile environment is just that: an environment, something that all must live in and be subject to. 

Even if you were able to separate out different kinds of migrants in the way that it sometimes imagined, it is wrong to believe that immigrants can be brought over as and when you like. Many current UK debates on easing immigration restrictions for certain occupations facing staff shortages really do seem to believe that all it takes is a flick of a switch and that once the shortages are resolved, the door can be closed again. But these employment offers are not attractive for many immigrant workers. A short-term opening to do some tough work, with no guarantees that you will be able to stay here and even implicitly the threat that you will soon no longer be welcome? It's not hard to imagine people finding better, particularly within the EU. 

This is the reality of managing a border. It is not a set of individual discreet options that can be endlessly finetuned to fit your most precise preferences and which we can control in an entirely unilateral way. It is a complex system where different movements are tied to each other, tied to the border policies of other countries or tied to structural factors outside of our control.

Until voters and decision-makers engage with the interrelated nature of the different movements across the UK's borders, reality will continue to fall short of expectations. Until actual outcomes are prioritised above the latest soundbite, the country will continue to suffer the consequences of a mismanaged and disorganised border. For the foreseeable future, shortages on the shelves and queueing at the border are here to stay.