There is no solid rationale for barring citizens of the U.K. from entering our shores now that we have COVID-19 vaccines.
There is no solid rationale for barring citizens of the U.K. from entering our shores now that we have COVID-19 vaccines.
B ack in June, I wrote caustically about the Kafka-esque experience I had when traveling to Britain to see my family. Last night, it occurred to me that, absurd as the rules in Britain may indeed be, they are actually preferable to the American approach, which, since March of last year, has been to block every British citizen from visiting the United States completely.
Yes, you read that right: For 16 months now, with the narrow exception of those who have an American-citizen spouse or American-citizen children, no one coming from Britain has been allowed to enter the United States. The prohibition is total. There are no testing prerequisites or quarantine rules. There are no exceptions for the fully vaccinated. There is no heavy bureaucracy or intrusive surveillance one can submit to in order to receive a thumbs up at the customs desk. If you’re a British citizen coming from Britain, the American border is hermetically sealed to you.
As an immigrant whose family lives in England, this rule has affected me profoundly. It has now been more than two years since my parents saw their grandkids, and nearly three years since my kids saw their cousins. The last time my mother held my youngest, he was just one; now, he chats incessantly and has a personality all his own. The last time we saw my niece, she was yet to walk; now, she performs freelance ballet in her living room. For adults, a year or two tends not to make a difference. For kids, it encompasses enormous changes that, once missed, can’t be experienced in retrospect. Since “15 days to slow the spread,” our plans have been canceled no fewer than three times. Now, we simply don’t make them. Can the family come here this Christmas? I guess that’ll depend on how tearful Rochelle Walensky is feeling come November.
There is no solid rationale for this policy now that we have COVID-19 vaccines. Every adult member of my English family has been fully vaccinated, and all would be prepared to take the same tests before they left for the United States as American citizens currently must before returning here. (What in the “science,” I wonder, makes these tests effective for Americans and permanent residents, but not for subjects of the Queen?) There are a great many problems with the idea of vaccine passports, but none of them apply to international travel, which already involves the presentation of literal passports, and which, by definition, attracts a level of government-led superintendence that would never be acceptable domestically. (Not to mention that immigrants of all sorts are unable to move legally to the United States unless they have had a whole host of mandatory inoculations.)
In the early days of the pandemic, when we knew very little about what we were dealing with and had no miracle vaccine as mitigation, it made sense to close the border. Now, it feels stubborn and cruel — especially given that, day in and day out, the establishment’s level of panic seems to be wholly contingent upon the circumstances. Apparently, SARS-CoV-2 remains sufficiently disastrous to shut down travel from our closest ally, but not to make any meaningful effort to shut down the Southern border, or even to publicly declare it a crisis. Day in, day out, I see videos of people walking into the United States from Mexico, and I hear critics of this arrangement being labeled as xenophobes. And yet if I suggest that my septuagenarian father be permitted to come here on a flight operated by British Airways, I am told I am not taking the risk posed by the virus as seriously as I should.
The key libertarian insight into government is that it is always far easier for a free people to prevent the state from taking control than for them to wrest that control back from the state once it has been granted. And so it is here. If travel between Britain and the United States had remained open as usual since the pandemic began, there is no way that the federal government would be restricting it now. But, having been established during a time of panic, the travel ban has its own inertia. To return things to the status quo, the Biden administration must take the proactive decision to relinquish supervision. And that, alas, will be much easier said than done. At this late stage, President Biden is faced with a choice between upsetting the relatively small constituency that the travel ban affects and renouncing the relentless safetyism that has marked his approach to COVID-19 from the start. It does not take a clairvoyant to divine which of the two represents the likelier path.
Pressed recently for a justification for the policy by Jonathan Ferro, a British journalist who had been forced to watch his father’s funeral on “the screen of an iPhone” by the American government’s policies, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was reduced to muttering carelessly about “science” and mouthing platitudes that sounded as if they had been drafted for him by the Stepford Homeowner’s Association. “I have spoken to scientists about this,” Ferro said, “and there is no scientific rationale.” “As transportation secretary,” Buttigieg replied bloodlessly, “I am as impatient as anybody to see us move as quickly as we responsibly can toward more forms of reopening.” “Right now,” though, he added, “what is going on is a set of working-group processes.”
Ah, well. That’s a comfort, at least.