Introduction

On 22 August 2017, Leo Varadkar, the newly elected Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland, paid a visit to the US–Canada border. Varadkar was wrapping up his official tour of Canada, where he had sought to closely align himself with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The two leaders were photographed together at state functions, diplomatic trade talks and marching in the Montreal Pride Parade, where they smiled and waved at the crowds in matching button-down shirts and chino combos. While the Canadian tour was intended to consolidate the beautiful friendship that began with a short visit by Trudeau to Dublin the previous month, Varadkar was also on a ‘fact-finding’ mission in light of the potential changes to Ireland's land border as a result of Brexit. With Brexit, the land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland will become a European Union (EU) external border, and thus the soft border that currently exists could be radically revised: ‘I have heard some people who are promoters of Brexit using [the US–Canada border] as an example of a solution that could work in Ireland’, Varadkar was quoted as saying, ‘I have heard them describe it as a soft border, I wonder if that is the case?’ (Kelly, 2017). Speaking the following day from the border, he was less equivocal, saying: ‘make no mistake, it's a hard border’ (Anderson, 2017).

For the last three decades, pro-globalisation advocates have been flaunting the promise of a ‘borderless world’ (Friedman, 2006), but practices of bordering have become more complex and uneven (Jones, 2016). While for some groups of people, movement has become frictionless, for others, the right to move has been restricted as borders have been militarised (Jones and Johnson, 2016). In the current context of Brexit and the Trump presidency, the performance of borders, if not the actual practice, is being significantly transformed so that borders are invoked and materially enforced in new ways. However, the intrinsically interconnected nature of the global economy has also meant that the impact of transformations in the UK and the US are having ramifications beyond the territories that they immediately bound. In this chapter, we are interested in how the dominant performance of borders and bordering is being reworked through Brexit and the Trump presidency.