The importance of nations

Last month, as millions of Americans were gathering with their families to give thanks for a bit of post-Covid normalcy, world leaders were scrambling to respond to a new strain of the virus discovered in South Africa. As scientists identified alarming features of the new variant, soon dubbed “Omicron,” governments in Europe and North America shut down travel to and from southern Africa.

Before long, the cascading travel bans provoked as much furor as the variant itself. South Africa protested that it was being “punished” instead of praised for its prompt research and transparency regarding the new threat, a complaint echoed by some epidemiologists. The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Ghebreyesus, tweeted out how “disappointed” he was over such travel bans and agitated for their removal. Not to be outdone, UN Secretary-General António Guterres turned up the rhetoric, describing the restrictions as a “travel apartheid.”

Although opinions will differ over the wisdom and utility of these travel restrictions, it is startling just how much ire such common-sensical measures have provoked from those otherwise keen to curtail Covid’s spread. In fact, however, this hostility to travel bans reveals important presuppositions of global elites. It shows how little they have been willing to learn from the lessons about geopolitics that Covid-19 has offered.

The idea behind a travel ban is straightforward: Some individuals from country X, intentionally or not, are likely to pose a threat to the members of our society, and since we cannot necessarily identify precisely who poses a threat and who does not, the government prudently imposes limits on a whole class of travelers for a time—not because we hate them, but because it is a government’s first responsibility to protect its citizens. Such restrictions are imperfect, but they can buy time for society to prepare and adjust.

The logic behind Covid travel bans is simply—in an intensified form—the logic behind migration restrictions in general. Every responsible government will limit the influx of foreigners—whether by imposing border checks or turning them away altogether—as a prudent measure to protect its citizens against threats known and unknown. Even though such measures are imperfect, they can still serve to reduce the threats to a manageable scale. Thus, for instance, many European countries in recent years have had to establish strict curbs on migration from North Africa and the Middle East to protect their populations against an overwhelming tide of refugees: not because every refugee was a criminal or a terrorist, but because the threat is credible. The same essential logic holds as the United States announced a temporary restriction on travel from South Africa in light of the Omicron variant.

Nations do have a duty to show hospitality to aliens in need, just as families do to hungry strangers, but each nation’s first duty before God, like each family’s, is to care for its own. Pope Francis, who has been among the leading advocates for an effectively borderless world, has condemned such behavior as “narrow self-interest”; but the Apostle Paul warned that whoever does not provide especially for his own household “is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8)—love for humanity has to begin at home.

There may be good reasons to object to recent Omicron-induced travel bans, but if so, they will be reasons that take the distinction between citizen and foreigner seriously. In one recent opinion piece for CNN, two epidemiologists admitted that travel bans would help slow the spread of the virus in western countries, but still insisted, “the benefit of minimizing the spread of Omicron in these nations through travel bans does not outweigh the economic cost to South Africa and other banned nations.” In other words, the American officials are to base every decision, not on whether it protects our citizens, but on whether the benefit to our citizens is greater than the harm suffered by non-citizens. Such a standard shifts every political decision into an impossible moral calculus of utilitarian universalism, wherein the combined interests of every person on the planet must be thrown into the balance and given equal weight. By the same logic, I cannot buy my wife a crock-pot for Christmas without first determining whether a housewife in the Philippines might not need a crock-pot more urgently.

If there is anything that the world should have learned from Covid by now, it is the folly of a world without borders. While we all might briefly enjoy the convenience of traveling without passports, customs, or Covid tests, we should give thanks that God gave us nations for our good and gave each the task of first looking out for its own—rather than the impossible task of trying to care for all humanity.