This is not a political problem, Mr. Trump. It’s a public health one.
A little more than a month ago, President Donald Trump announced that he was considering expanding new travel restrictions beyond Iran, South Korea, and Italy and applying them to the U.S.-Mexico border amid growing coronavirus concerns. Speaking at a White House press conference, Trump said, “We are thinking about the southern border. We are looking at that very strongly.”
At the time, February 29, the United States had 66 confirmed cases of the novel illness within its borders; Mexico had confirmed three.
As others have been quick to point out, efforts to mitigate and control the coronavirus threat by the Trump administration have become conflated with the president’s long-time “obsession with immigrants, undocumented, legal or aspiring,” allowing for ample opportunity to enact the tough, restrictive measures he has always advocated for.
As Andrew Selee, director of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, puts it, “The border has always been a symbol in his larger worldview about dangers coming from the outside.”
Rather than place a blanket restriction against all immigrants, however, Trump has shown preferential treatment for a certain class of immigrants: those willing to fill in the jobs many Americans continue to show aversion to, despite the nation’s skyrocketing unemployment rate.
In a recent move that has reportedly angered his base and baffled immigration activists and government officials alike, the administration has begun to reduce requirements for immigrants seeking employment as farm workers, landscapers, and crab pickers, among others — sectors key to maintaining food on America’s table during the crisis.
This should not come as a surprise. Immigration policies have long been linked to the fluctuating needs of the economy they necessarily serve.
In the mid-sixties, after the seasonal Bracero Program was eliminated and replaced with the landmark 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolishing discriminatory national origins quotas and replacing them with the first numerical cap of annual immigrant visas per country outside of the western hemisphere, there was a dramatic surge in illegal immigration to the U.S.
However, the same need for employment remained, and as Douglas Massey, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, explains, the shift in policy effectively “transformed Mexican immigration from a de jure guest worker program based on the circulation of legal braceros into a de facto guest worker program based on the circulation of undocumented migrants.”
Despite changing immigration policies over time, undocumented workers continue to make up a large part of the workforce currently deemed “essential” to providing services for American society amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Nonetheless, to the Trump administration, these workers are treated as expendable labour, granted leeway insofar as they’re convenient for the U.S. economy, but denied when they ask for basic human rights.
With the administration’s “public charge” rule, green-lit by the Supreme Court back in January, penalizing green-card applicants who use social safety net programs, and the continuing ICE raids despite shelter-in-place orders, it’s a lose-lose situation for many immigrants who must weigh impossible options.
As has been argued, the lack of access to health insurance, healthy food, and affordable housing — the very services most needed during a crisis — is not only disproportionately detrimental to unauthorized immigrants, but, in a pandemic such as this one, detrimental to all of us, as “our health is only as good as our most vulnerable neighbor’s.”
The administration would do well to follow the example of Portugal, whose government has temporarily provided all migrants and asylum-seekers full citizenship rights, including comprehensive access to healthcare, in an effort to battle the virus outbreak.
Rather than use this opportunity to further his own political agenda, Trump should recognize the inevitable rearrangement of priorities that must occur to deal with a crisis. If he really wants to put “America first,” he must put the fundamental well-being of people — no matter their passport — first.
