Back in July, I outlined why Joe Biden’s crude COVID-19 travel bans on non-Americans coming from Europe, India, and a few other countries no longer made any sense from a public health perspective.
Talk in Washington at the time was of lifting these restrictions by September. Well, here we are, mid-way through that month and the restrictions are going strong. Officials and diplomats now seem to think October or even Thanksgiving are the earliest potential dates for their removal. Some ponder whether the political incentives might point towards inaction until the mid-terms…which would mean bans had been in place for 32 MONTHS.
For background again: since last spring, the U.S. international border has prohibited entry for travelers from the Schengen EU travel zone (the EU’s passport free countries), the U.K., Ireland, Iran and China within the previous 14 days. India, South Africa and Brazil were added to the restricted list during their respective outbreaks. Americans, permanent U.S. residents, their dependents, spouses, children and certain student visa holders or permanent visa applicants are exempt from these rules, just requiring a negative test before entering the US. But nonimmigrant U.S. work visa holders and non-American visitors to the U.S. are not; a lot of the former already here are therefore scared of leaving, in case they cannot get back into the country.
As a great op-ed by Josh Glancy in the UK’s Times newspaper concluded, that inertia means that entry to the U.S., particularly for those traveling from Europe, is currently governed by “a set of rules instituted over 500 days ago that bear absolutely no resemblance to the reality we now inhabit.” Oliver Wiseman and I wrote for the Dispatch this week that these rules are even less coherent given President Biden’s attempts to cajole everyone into being vaccinated through a workplace mandate. Removing them isn’t just in the self-interest of whiny Europeans or H‑1B visa holders, either. These bans are harming American families and businesses too.
So here’s a quick rundown of eight reasons the bans should be scrapped as soon as possible.
- The bans have no link to the prevalence of COVID-19.
When the China and Europe bans were first introduced, COVID-19 appeared highly concentrated in those places, so there was at least some defensible rationale to restricting travel from those parts of the world (studies later implied the public health benefit of banning entry even at that stage was negligible, perhaps because the bans didn’t cover Americans or because the existing spread of the disease in the U.S. was large anyway). In any case, COVID-19 has now spread pretty much everywhere. And yet no blacklisted countries have been removed from the restrictions after joining the list.
As our Dispatch piece highlighted, “Poland, for example, today has just 10.2 new daily cases per million people. In Costa Rica, the equivalent figure is 484. In Israel, it is 797- a level almost seven times higher than for the EU as a whole.” But non-American travelers from Costa Rica and Israel can come and go from the United States as they please, while those traveling from Poland and other EU countries continue to be barred from entering. In fact, late in August, research suggested COVID-19 prevalence was higher in non-banned countries overall than banned countries, and far lower in both groups than in the U.S. itself. New daily COVID-19 case rates per million, for example, are currently almost four times higher in the U.S. than in the EU.
There is no COVID-19 prevalence justification, then, for travel from this specific set of countries to be generally banned.
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