Travel Bans Forever

At last Friday’s Tulsa rally, President Trump said about the illegal alien invasion he has sought to circumvent, “Nobody’s getting in.”

A bit hyperbolic, sure, but illegal border crossings are exponentially down. Trump has repeatedly said about violent Hispanic gangs, “We’re getting them out by the thousands.”

Few getting in, the worst of the worst going out.

As the United States of America reaches its 244^th birthday, these statements sum up the situation the nation finds itself in regarding immigration policy.

It’s more than just a southern border crackdown. There are the travel bans to consider. The original bans, that were ordered against some Mid-Eastern, African, and South American countries, and North Korea. The Chinese coronavirus ban, and related Euro-ban (still not lifted but might be soon, according to the president). Sum it up: in terms of the free flow of people coming into the country, the party is over.

And there’s civil unrest in the homeland now that raises a question about whether the travel bans, COVID bans, and heightened border enforcement may be the silver linings in a noxious cloud of bad news.

Polling majorities of the American people have for decades wanted immigration reform with strict enforcement on illegal entry. President Ronald Reagan’s ambitious but ultimately unenforced 1986 Immigration and Reform and Control Act was an attempt to address the situation. Reagan was a great president, only Donald Trump has done more to bring a semblance of sanity to national immigration policy. But his act failed miserably.

In the wake of the Reagan amnesty, illegal immigration skyrocketed. Trump took office promising to stanch the flow, and he has, despite the left’s relentless legal efforts to prevent him from succeeding where Reagan did not.

Now, nature — “mother nature,” epidemiological inevitability, God or whatever moving hand might resonate best with a given belief system —has augmented the Trump administration’s efforts to achieve the heretofore unachievable. A virus has emerged from the petri dish of the human organism and upended the chessboard on which policy surrounding immigration and the global flow of peoples plays out.

COVID-19 has done what a generation of border security politicians and advocates have been unable to accomplish. Travel bans are no longer exclusively about terrorism and economic health. The new travel bans are about plague, the science of pandemic, even if you don’t believe that coronavirus is a pandemic-level threat. You can’t make ideologically-based arguments about national borders against a virus.

Now comes an added consideration that argues in favor of keeping our current compliment of travel bans, border enforcement mechanisms, and suspensions of temporary worker visas in force for the foreseeable future.

For all the dangers posed by China’s evil COVID nondisclosures, the dictatorial machinations of Vladimir Putin, Islamic extremism, the Third World’s great unwashed, and Europe’s descent into border-less socialism, we have met our most pressing enemy, and the enemy is within the gates. We’ve got all we can handle in the way of threats to our American way of life right here, right now.

Add this to the reasons why we must be extremely selective about who we’re letting in. We have to get our house in order before we throw down the welcome mat, and even then, as Trump says, admission will be based on merit and merit alone. Immigrants have to bring something of value, something we don’t already have too much of. We can’t take more socioeconomic refugees. Those who do apply for entry must be fully vetted — man, woman, and child — and be able to stay off the public dole and support themselves. They are going to have to be damn good at whatever they do if they expect to take a job that should go to a U.S. citizen.

Finally, just as you can’t carry the coronavirus and come here, you shouldn’t be able to carry the virus of un-Americanism either. Because we are very obviously full up; our tanks are topped with malcontents. There are legions of aspiring destroyers in our midst.

What about all those good foreigners whose ultimate dream it is to migrate to the United States?

With COVID-19 and homegrown anti-Americanism running rampant, it’s not a good time. Until domestic stability is bolstered by the laws of the land, we’re shutting off the transom. Check back with us in…

The era of the multipurpose travel ban is upon us.