I read something recently - last couple of days - which I can't now find but which said something smart about the Irish border issue in Brexit. It said the only way to have a meaningful border was to make it the Irish Sea between the islands of Britain and Ireland.
The notion is to allow Northern Ireland to exist outside the border of the U.K., to enforce border controls at ferry ports and airports where people arriving from the island of Ireland will be screened and goods and services controlled by customs. Unionists in Northern Ireland won't like it one bit, but they'll like a hard border with the Irish Republic even less.
When we spent a year on Guam in the mid-1980s, the U.S. treated the island this way. Goods came into Guam duty free from Asia, but could not be shipped duty-free from Guam to the rest of the U.S.
When we came back to the States we had to have a list of everything we'd bought on-island and were bringing home, along with what we'd paid. In spite of this peculiarity, Guam was then, and remains, very much U.S. territory, flies the U.S. flag, uses the U.S. dollar, is served by the U.S. Postal Service, its residents are U.S. citizens and have U.S. passports.
I think something similar could work for Northern Ireland. That is, as long as EU people who migrate to N.I. don't thereby achieve U.K. citizenship or the right to move to the rest of the U.K. at will.
Limiting immigration was a major motivation for those who voted for Brexit. I wonder how the Northern Irish - unionist and republican - will like it if they're outnumbered by immigrant Poles, Czechs, and Bulgarians?
