COVID-19 has dominated national (and international) news cycle over the past month, and in the past week, all major sports leagues have cancelled or postponed their seasons, events such as E3 and the Houston Rodeo have been shut down, and even Disneyland is closing its doors.
Leftist pundits, the hammers for whom every crisis is a socialist nail, have responded by attacking the President for either too much action or inaction, depending on the day, and also by doubling down on their demand for open borders.
The Democratic Party has effectively campaigned for open borders for years now.
President Obama famously used executive orders to deprioritize prosecution of certain illegal immigrants. Every Democratic candidate who began the presidential primary agreed that illegal immigrants should be allowed access to free healthcare.
Recently, progressive justices on the Supreme Court argued states should not be allowed to prosecute illegal immigrants for identity theft. The left is fully invested now in importing millions of illegal immigrants and will not let a worldwide pandemic stop them.
Globalists consider the free movement of goods and people to be worth any price.
In fact, they like to pretend there is absolutely no downside to open borders. “The Coronavirus Pandemic is one of many reasons neo-nationalism is destructive & ultimately futile. Viruses… don’t care about lines on a map,” tweeted Harvard psychologist and open borders advocate Steven Pinker.
The Coronavirus Pandemic is one of many reasons neo-nationalism is destructive & ultimately futile. Viruses (like greenhouse gases, cybercriminals, dark money, terrorists, pirates, & technology) don’t care about lines on a map. https://t.co/fWt72EnzPn
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) March 1, 2020
Yet history, both ancient and recent, shows that viruses can indeed be stopped by lines on a map.
Viruses depend upon human hosts for transmission, and by containing the movement of people you can contain the spread of the virus. Our ancestors knew this, even without the knowledge of epidemiology or germ theory that we enjoy today.
The Mosaic Laws of the Bible instruct people suffering from leprosy to live apart from society as long as they exhibited signs of disease. During the Black Plague in Europe, the city of Ragusa (modern day Dubrovnik, Croatia) instituted a system of isolating travelers from diseased areas for 40 days. Quaraginta literally means “40 days” in Latin, the origin of our word “quarantine”.
During the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918, places such as American Samoa and Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco shut themselves off from the outside world and waited for the disease to take its course. These places ended up having a much lower percentage of infections and deaths than places that remained open to travelers. Quarantines work.
Yet the globalist left is determined to never let a serious crisis go to waste, as President Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel said about the Great Recession.
The media is using the pandemic as an opportunity to gaslight the American people into believing that borders and walls somehow increase our risk for infection.
Nations that are serious about protecting their citizens have closed their borders and instituted quarantine procedures.
Israel began strict screening procedures several weeks ago. Hungary has closed its borders as well. Italy placed their entire country on lockdown to try and contain the outbreak that has ravaged their people. The time to contain a pandemic, however, is before it spreads.
President Trump proactively banned travel from China in January, a move that was attacked as premature and xenophobic by the left, but even that was not enough to keep the virus from our shores.
Nevertheless, it surely kept the problem from getting worse. “There’s no question that if we had not done that in a timely way, there would’ve been many more travel-related cases from China,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci earlier this week.
History tells us that the way to keep our citizens safe from deadly pandemics such as COVID-19 is to take decisive action.
President Trump announced further travel bans, including most of Europe as well as Iran, but even that is not enough. If the American government is serious about protecting its citizens, then it should halt all travel in and out of our country.
Allow citizens to come home if necessary, but quarantine them as long as needed to ensure they are not bringing more disease with them.
Even Canada, the favorite example of benevolent socialism for the American left, has closed its borders. It is time for us to do likewise, without worrying about being called racist or xenophobic. The Democrats and their friends in the media are not serious about protecting American lives; they are just using this crisis to push their same old politics.
A nation WITHOUT BORDERS is not a nation at all. We must have a wall. The rule of law matters. Jeb just doesn’t get it.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 28, 2015
The reason why national borders exist is to protect the citizens of that nation from external threats, whether those threats are invading soldiers or carriers of a deadly virus. “A nation without borders is not a nation at all,” said Donald Trump on the campaign trail in 2015. He is right, and now more than ever is the time to use those borders to protect the American people.
