When COVID Authoritarianism Met Border Authoritarianism (opinion)

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18-02-2025

When the World Closed Its Doors: The COVID-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders, by Edward Alden and Laurie Trautman, Oxford University Press, 344 pages, $29.99
In late 2021, Charlotte Bellis, an unmarried journalist from New Zealand, found herself pregnant while working in Qatar, a country where that status carries the risk of jail time or deportation. A doctor advised her to get married or get out of the country. But New Zealand, which at that point still was taking drastic measures to limit the spread of COVID-19, allowed its citizens to come home only if they secured lottery-allocated spots in a government-run quarantine program. Bellis applied but was unsuccessful. Desperate, she turned to the Taliban.
The Islamic fundamentalist group said yes. Bellis made her way to Afghanistan, where she had worked and where her boyfriend was based. "When the Taliban offers you—a pregnant, unmarried woman—safe haven, you know your situation is messed up," she wrote in The New Zealand Herald in January 2022.
Bellis continued to ask the New Zealand government for permission to return home, concerned about the risks of giving birth in Afghanistan, but it kept turning her down. Only after New Zealand's largest newspaper publicized her story did the government change course.
When the World Closed Its Doors, by Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Edward Alden and Border Policy Research Institute Director Laurie Trautman, is filled with stories like this, which remind readers of the absurd measures governments took to prevent the spread of COVID-19 across borders. These policies were ostensibly directed outward, targeting foreigners. But as is often the case with border controls, they inflicted damage internally too, infringing on citizens' rights and going hand in hand with domestic restrictions.
Travel restrictions, which all of the 194 World Health Organization (WHO) member states deployed against COVID-19, may seem like a sensible pandemic response. It is easy to forget that the WHO had long viewed such measures as ineffective and counterproductive. Beyond doing little to stop contagion, travel restrictions can stop critical personnel and equipment from crossing borders. They also can foster secrecy. After South African scientists discovered the new, fast-spreading omicron COVID-19 variant in November 2021, many countries responded by imposing travel bans on South Africa and its neighbors. A government might conclude that transparency is not worth the economic damage of canceled flights and vacations.
Countries responded to COVID-19 with travel restrictions because they were popular and relatively easy to enforce, Alden and Trautman argue. But many such rules were not evenly or ethically enforced. Governments drew the line between "essential" and "nonessential" reasons to cross borders in ways that were as arbitrary and dehumanizing as the lines they drew between "essential" and "nonessential" workers. Many, acting quickly in the early days of the pandemic, implemented heavy-handed restrictions with little thought about exceptions.
The enforcement came down in uniquely painful ways on specific communities. Consider the predicament of Point Roberts, Washington. In the 19th century, the United Kingdom and the United States agreed to draw the boundary between their territories along the 49th parallel, unaware that it crossed a small peninsula. A community of 1,200 people eventually grew on a patch of the U.S. that was physically disconnected from the rest of the country. Before COVID, residents of Point Roberts relied on Canadian medical care, tourism, and grocery stores. That all changed in March 2020.
Strict crossing and quarantine requirements upended just about every aspect of life in Point Roberts. Canada announced that it would not exempt cross-border students from a 14-day quarantine period, so one family sent their child to live with Canadian friends during the school year. A Point Roberts resident who crossed the border to care for her elderly mother and disabled sister could no longer make the trip because it was deemed nonessential and subject to a 14-day quarantine period. The community lost 80 percent of its economic activity and saw little federal relief. Residents were all but barred from making the 40-minute drive to the nearest American town; it fell to Bellingham, Washington, to fund an emergency ferry to the U.S. mainland that cost $3,500 per day.
Several countries imposed border controls so strict that thousands of their citizens were barred from coming home. At one point, it was a crime, punishable by up to five years in jail, for Australians to reenter their own country. Amid backlash, the Australian government announced that 4,000 citizens and residents per week could return. A year into the pandemic, about 40,000 Australian citizens were still stranded abroad. New Zealand's restrictions were perhaps the tightest in the world after North Korea's, as Bellis learned. "Prime Minister [Jacinda] Ardern became 'a global liberal icon' for doing what liberals had long denounced when the same measures were used by conservative governments—closing borders to keep out an external threat," write Alden and Trautman.
For the first time, the authors argue, governments took the tools they had wielded against asylum seekers and other vulnerable migrants and began to use them against their own citizens and the citizens of friendly nations. The quarantine quota system used in Australia and New Zealand pit citizens against each other for limited tickets home; America's green-card caps create similar scarcity among temporary visa holders hoping to adjust to permanent status and residents hoping to reunite with family members. Pandemic-era travelers could be turned away or let into a country based on factors as arbitrary as a border guard's discretion; asylum seekers face similarly uneven applications of the law when judges decide their cases. Celebrities were allowed to flout rules that kept couples and family members apart.
The European Union initially tested tougher border controls in response to a migrant crisis, not a public health threat. But its actions during the former set precedents for how it would deal with the latter. When more than 1 million migrants from the Middle East and Africa sought protection in Europe in 2015, E.U. members implemented restrictions within the Schengen free travel area. Sweden and Denmark turned passport controls on one another despite a six-decade legacy of free mobility. France kept some of the measures from this period in place for years, later justifying them on pandemic-related grounds. While the European Commission did not oppose outward-facing travel restrictions as E.U. members responded to COVID-19, it urged them not to impose travel bans against one another. The call fell on deaf ears.
In the U.S., meanwhile, the Trump administration used the pandemic to reinforce its border-tightening agenda. Top immigration adviser Stephen Miller had pushed the president to block asylum seekers by using the executive branch's powers under Title 42 of the U.S. Code, which includes a public health provision authorizing "suspension of entries and imports from designated places to prevent spread of communicable diseases." Miller's efforts were finally successful when COVID-19 hit and the administration invoked that provision to expel migrants millions of times, often exposing them to dangers such as rape, kidnapping, and assault across the border in Mexico. The Title 42 order was not lifted by the Biden administration until May 2023.
Those who lived through the pandemic are understandably reluctant to look back on the damage wrought by government responses. Most are ill-equipped to consider how harmful border restrictions were, given that their worst effects were felt by small subsets of populations. That reality, combined with laws that made it easy for governments to close borders for long periods, has encouraged policymakers to view travel restrictions as a valuable response to future crises.
Alden and Trautman suggest three kinds of reform to safeguard people's rights: better international cooperation, checks on emergency powers, and improved risk management. Unfortunately, international conversations about how to reduce harm to border crossers during public health crises have stalled. Few courts have adequately scrutinized the scope of emergency powers. And governments have yet to reconsider the frequently faulty utilitarian logic they applied to questions of who should be allowed to enter a country and who should not.
Tough border restrictions were a failure, Alden and Trautman conclude. Real solutions require far more thought and nuance than simply turning the state's power on people unlucky enough to be caught on the wrong side of a border.
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