By Stan Veuger

International travel and migration have been disrupted severely by the COVID-19 pandemic. The US barred most non-US citizens travelling from China in January 2020, and has since added a laundry list of other countries to its travel ban list. The travel ban applies to practically everyone who is not a citizen or permanent resident and who has in the previous two weeks visited the European Schengen area, Ireland, the United Kingdom, China, India, Brazil, Iran, or South Africa.

The restrictions may have been reasonable in the early stages of the pandemic, but they are now a bizarre exercise in political cowardice. Many of the countries on the list have both lower rates of COVID-19 spread and higher rates of vaccination than the United States. In fact, the countries subject to the travel ban have lower rates of spread than the countries from which travel is not banned! This discrepancy, illustrated in the figure below, is particularly mesmerizing in light of the fact that even unvaccinated visitors from black-listed countries can enter the US after spending two weeks in a non-blacklisted country with greater COVID-19 rates.

While not motivated by the kind of bigotry that prompted the
Trump administration’s Muslim ban, the restrictions inflict serious and
unnecessary harm on countless individuals and families. These include students
and workers on non-immigrant visas in the US who have effectively not been able
to visit their home countries for the past year and a half; parents of US
citizens and permanent residents who are not allowed to visit their children
and grandchildren; and family and friends of US persons who want to attend
weddings, funerals, and such here.

They are devastating as well for Americans who work in
segments of the tourism, leisure, and hospitality industries that are focused
on overseas visitors. In addition, a number of European countries have now
started retaliating by reinstating travel restrictions and quarantine
requirements on Americans.

There are a number of better policies the administration could adopt instead. It could admit travelers with proof of vaccination; it could admit travelers with a negative test result; it could even admit only travelers with both proof of vaccination and a negative test result; or it could update its blacklist to at least resemble a list based on public health considerations. The current insanity is such that the State Department has issued the same level of travel advisory for France, Iceland, and Spain over COVID-19 as it has for Afghanistan.

The only reason to cling to the policy status quo is an irrational fear of political backlash from further spread of the virus due to travel from the currently blacklisted countries. This fear is irrational not just because currently blacklisted countries do not pose the greatest threat, or because vaccination or test restrictions can dramatically limit those risks. It is also irrational because citizens and permanent residents, including yours truly, can travel and have traveled to the US from the banned countries every single day since the start of the pandemic, making the ban not just bizarre and cruel, but ineffective too.

The post Biden’s cruel and bizarre travel ban appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.