Travel bans and COVID-19

In Justice for People on the Move, Gillian Brock helpfully proposes a number of internal and contribution requirements, central to human rights practice, that must constrain states’ exclusion of non-citizens. On her account, failing to meet these requirements would undermine states’ claim to legitimacy. In particular, Brock persuasively shows that the USA’ travel ban on non-citizens from Muslim-majority countries violates the legitimacy constraint. Building on Brock’s framework, I analyse two other types of travel bans. In response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the US first imposed travel bans on travellers from China and Europe to prevent further transmission of the virus. More recently, the US has issued a proclamation that suspends the entry of any immigrants who purportedly risk harming the US labour market in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. Would both these travel bans meet Brock’s internal and contribution requirements for state legitimacy? I discuss these questions in my response to Brock’s book, which proceeds in this order. I begin in Section 2 by recapping the legitimacy constraints that Brock places on states’ right to exclude non-citizens: specifically, what she calls the ‘internal’ and ‘contribution’ requirements, which focus on states’ role in upholding a robust regime of human rights protections (2020: 34). I then explain Brock’s criticism of the USA’s infamous ‘Muslim ban’, which she performs through the lens of these legitimacy constraints. Next, in Section 3, I expand on two different travel bans that have been imposed in the name of the COVID-19 pandemic and their implications for global migration: bans on travellers from certain geographic regions (which now includes US citizens themselves), and bans on migration on the basis that it will pose a threat to local workers in the period of economic recovery. In Section 4, using Brock’s framework, I evaluate their ethical permissibility. There, I argue that regional travel bans are not only justifiable, but necessary from the perspective of legitimacy, with certain caveats. On the other hand, while travel bans on the basis of ‘economic threat’ might be permissible in theory, the US’s application has been deeply unjust in practice. I conclude in Section 5.