- Trump's misunderstanding of labor markets. Trump thinks that the United States is so great that people want to come here, regardless of the situation. As great as the U.S. economy was prior to this pandemic, the truth is that the labor market is hurting. For one, international travel has been all but nonexistent because we're in the middle of a pandemic. Most people are scared to travel because they don't want to catch COVID-19. The virus is widespread in the United States, and most would-be immigrants would rather not risk it. This leads to the second reason: there has been a major drop in the demand for labor. Immigrants are most likely to move when job prospects are good. As Stanford University mentioned when analyzing the Great Recession, immigration declines when there is a weakening in the labor demand. At the onset of the Great Recession, more undocumented immigrants left than came. Immigrants don't need an executive order telling them to not come to the United States when the economic benefits are too low.
- [May 1, 2020 Addendum: To further illustrate the point that people do not need an executive order to deter them from coming during a pandemic, Cato Institute released an analysis on how there was a 98 percent decline in non-citizens flying to the United States prior to the executive order].
- Are immigrants more likely to spread COVID-19? Intuitively, population density plays a much larger role in the spread of COVID-19. The virus doesn't care whether an individual is native-born or foreign-born. The Cato Institute points out that the data show that there is no correlation between immigrant share of the population and the number of COVID-19 cases or deaths. Also, the Cato Institute conducted a literature review on pandemic travel bans. The main conclusion was that there is no benefit to pandemic travel restrictions once the outbreak is already in the country.
- Immigration is good for the economy and employment. The argument Trump is using is that of the displacement theory, which is immigrants will take the jobs of native-born workers and push them out of the labor market. First of all, that theory has almost never played out in practice. Even when it rarely has happened, it has only affected high school dropouts. So Trump's primary fear isn't valid for the vast majority of the labor market. More to the point, immigrants have fueled economic growth and benefit the vast majority of U.S. citizens (Griswold, 2017). That notion applies to both low-skilled and high-skilled immigrants alike. Immigration boost productivity levels (Peri, 2009), and the immigrants who are in the healthcare industry are going to be vital in fighting COVID-19 (Griswold and Salmon, 2020). Also, the Federal Reserve found that there is scant evidence that immigration has an effect on the unemployment rate (Vandenbroucke and Zhu, 2017).
- It could reasonably last longer than 60 days. Right now, the proclamation is in effect for 60 days, but it can be continued (Section 4). And what's to think that Trump won't take full advantage of it? His so-called "Muslim Ban" (Executive Order 13769) from 2017 was only supposed to last 90 days. Guess what? It's still in effect. If Trump is going to use the justification of protecting the job prospects of U.S. laborers, then he will be waiting for a while. The current economic downturn is projected to be the worst since the Great Depression. As brought up in the previous point, immigration is good for the economy. Cutting off immigration for an extended period of time is going to delay the economic recovery further.
Since Trump has been in office, he has had an axe to grind with immigration. He doesn't have a problem only with undocumented workers, but "legal immigration": chain migration, those protected under temporary protected status and DACA, low-skilled immigrants, and immigrants with H-1B visas. Even during the pandemic, Trump has banned travel from China, Iran, and most of Europe, as well as closing its borders for nonessential travel between Canada and Mexico. Most visas have already been halted, which means that most travel cannot take place. While the proclamation is mostly redundant, Trump is nevertheless taking aim at long-term visas, the very sort of immigration that is going to help us recover from this economy.
If that is the case, why do it at all? As Reason Magazine brings up, this is virtue signaling to his base, plain and simple. The pandemic has been great fodder for Trump to advance his protectionism and restrictionist immigration policies. Trump should be focused on fighting the pandemic with solutions that actually work, not on getting geared up for the election in November. More than ever we need policy that helps employers hire employees and pull us out of this economic downturn, not a political tactic that distracts us from the larger issues at hand.
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