By Stan Veuger

Earlier this week senior Biden administration officials attempted to defend its cruel, bizarre, and ineffective COVID-19 travel ban.

For example, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said that “We want to move to a metrics-based system. Before we can do that, we have to get a better handle on the domestic situation, which requires us to get everyone vaccinated.”

While it is laudable that the Commerce Secretary acknowledged
that the current travel restrictions are not “metrics-based,” the second part
of her statement is nonsensical. Banning vaccinated travelers with negative
tests from entering the country does nothing to address the domestic situation.
And of course we’re never going to “get everyone vaccinated.”

But current policy is more nonsensical than the previous
paragraph suggests. The figure below illustrates this point: The travel ban
restricts travel from countries with lower COVID-19 case rates than the
countries from which travel is not restricted. And both categories have (much)
lower infection rates than the US.

As a consequence, if an H1-B worker travels to a blacklisted
country — where he is less likely to get infected than in the US — he is not
allowed to return home.

Administration officials also pointed to the Delta variant as a justification for continuing the travel ban. The Delta virus is already widespread in the US, as even someone who follows the news only casually ought to know. Indeed, the US may even be the current epicenter of the pandemic; three out of every ten COVID-19 cases diagnosed in the past seven days afflicted American citizens, despite Americans making up only 4 percent of the world’s population.

The administration has offered up more nonsensical
justifications for sticking with the travel ban. White House Coronavirus Response
Coordinator Jeff Zients claimed that they are developing a “new system for
international travel” that will include contact tracing. We are a year and
a half into the pandemic and are nowhere near having even a domestic contact
tracing system! Even if this were realistic on a reasonable timeline, it still
does not explain why banning vaccinated travelers from countries with low rates
of COVID-19 makes sense. And again, this is particularly nonsensical given the
arbitrary list of blacklisted countries.

Note that air travel safety is not the concern here: In
fact, travel from Canada and Mexico by air is generally allowed, while travel
by car, bike, or foot is generally banned.

Zients also said that “[w]e are exploring considering
vaccination requirements for foreign nationals traveling to the United States.”
By all means! Stop exploring, start and stop considering, and start imposing
them tomorrow on travelers from the blacklisted countries!

While not every vaccinated traveler may be able to provide
satisfactory proof of vaccination, it will at least lift the current draconian
restrictions on US-based visa holders, most of whom have surely been vaccinated
here. In addition, a number of blacklisted countries have reliable national
vaccination databases that should allow travel from those countries to resume.

But my suspicion is that the administration has little interest in this kind of return to normalcy. Instead, its central goal in this area is to avoid the overwhelmingly imaginary political risks associated with loosening any of the restrictions, nonsensical as they may be, and the consequences be damned.

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