Globalist ideologues, bureaucrats, and elected Democrats have said the United States’ response to protecting American citizens from the coronavirus should be to keep America’s borders open to the world.
While the deadly coronavirus spreads across the globe, The Atlantic writer James Hamblin wrote this week that the U.S. should actually consider opening its borders:
Italy, Iran, and South Korea are now among the countries reporting quickly growing numbers of detected COVID-19 infections. Many countries have responded with containment attempts, despite the dubious efficacy and inherent harms of China’s historically unprecedented crackdown. Certain containment measures will be appropriate, but widely banning travel, closing down cities, and hoarding resources are not realistic solutions for an outbreak that lasts years. All of these measures come with risks of their own. Ultimately some pandemic responses will require opening borders, not closing them. At some point the expectation that any area will escape effects of COVID-19 must be abandoned: The disease must be seen as everyone’s problem. [Emphasis added]
To the contrary, President Trump’s administration has imposed a travel ban on China where not only are Chinese nationals barred from entering the U.S. at this time, but foreign nationals who have recently visited China as well.
The announcement came as bureaucrats at the World Health Organization (WHO) have demanded nations to keep their borders open, Reuters reported:
There is a “huge reason to keep official border crossings open” to avoid people entering irregularly and going unchecked for symptoms, WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier told a Geneva briefing. “If travel restrictions would be imposed we hope they are as short-lived as possible to try to continue the normal flow of life,” he added. [Emphasis added]
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has slammed nations that have decided to impose travel bans to protect their citizens from the coronavirus, claiming such measures are not necessary.
“There is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade,” Ghebreyesus said last month. “We call on all countries to implement decisions that are evidence-based and consistent. WHO stands ready to provide advice to any country that is considering which measures to take.”
Most recently, Ghebreyesus has sought to portray the global spread of the coronavirus as one that is inevitable with or without travel bans by calling it a “test of political solidarity” to “fight a common enemy that does not respect borders…”
Elected Democrats in Washington, D.C. have joined the globalist chorus to keep America’s borders open amid the coronavirus outbreak, suggesting that travel bans may lead to discrimination against Asian Americans:
“This is a virus that happened to pop up in China. But the virus doesn’t discriminate between Asian versus non-Asian,” saidRep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), a former emergency room physician who will preside over Congress’ first hearing on the outbreak on Wednesday. “In our response we can’t create prejudices and harbor anxieties toward one population.” [Emphasis added]
…
“We shouldn’t have an antagonistic relationship with the Chinese. We should be working hand in hand,” he said. Besides the diplomatic blowback, he said, the travel ban “probably doesn’t make sense,” since the outbreak has already spread to several other countries. [Emphasis added]
“At this juncture, it’s going to be very hard to contain the virus,” Bera told POLITICO, noting that his priority now is to get CDC’s epidemiologists into China to study the origin of the pandemic. [Emphasis added]
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who is running to be the 2020 Democrat presidential nominee, refused to commit to closing America’s borders amid global disease and virus outbreaks like the coronavirus during this week’s CBS Democrat debate.
Likewise, the George Soros-funded American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) denounced Trump’s travel ban to protect Americans from the coronavirus, claiming travel bans “do more harm than good.”
“These measures are extraordinary incursions on liberty and fly in the face of considerable evidence that travel bans and quarantines can do more harm than good, including studies from the World Health Organization itself,” the ACLU’s Jay Stanley said in a statement.
In 2017, Breitbart News reported on a study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) that warned of the potential for a deadly disease outbreak across the U.S. if proper illegal and legal immigration controls were not implemented.
The FAIR report noted:
Most illnesses are spread by contact with infected people, livestock or agricultural produce. As a result, researchers have concluded that the international movement of people is a significant factor in disease outbreaks: ‘Mobile populations can link zones of disease emergence to low prevalence or non-endemic areas through rapid or high-volume international movements, or both.
