There is much to regret about the rollout and rhetoric of the Trump administration’s 2017 “Muslim travel ban,” which would have more accurately and usefully been called a pause on travel from countries with terrorism problems. But an unintended good effect of that policy and political debacle, given the coronavirus outbreak in China, may be the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Hawaii.
Executive Order No. 13769, Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States, rested on statutory bedrock, 8 U.S. Code § 1182, Inadmissible aliens. In a 2018 opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court stated that the plain language of Section 1182 vests the president with authority and broad discretion to restrict the entry of people he finds detrimental to U.S. interests, including for risks related to communicable diseases of public health significance.
Meanwhile, several large Chinese cities, including Wuhan, a metropolis of 11 million people, are on lockdown because of the coronavirus. The deadly pneumonialike disease has infected at least 2,700 people there and killed at least 80 of them so far this month. Medical personnel appear overwhelmed, and emergency field hospitals are being built.
Coronavirus cases have already been reported in 13 other countries, including five in the United States.
The death rate from coronavirus is nearly comparable to that of the Spanish influenza of 1918. The Great Influenza killed 50 million people worldwide, at least 675,000 in the U.S. alone. My maternal grandfather, then a boy on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, recalled bodies stacked like cordwood between the tenements because gravediggers could not keep up.
Meanwhile, there is no reason to believe anything China’s Communist government tells us about coronavirus. Beijing’s leaders lied about the spread of fatal diseases such as AIDS and SARS in the past. Chinese Communist Party leaders, like those in any other atheist totalitarian regime, lie as naturally as they breathe, as they believe their dishonesty is ideologically justified.
Communist China is an evil dictatorship, responsible for the deaths of 40 million of its people since 1949. It persecutes democracy activists, ethnic minorities, and religious believers of any faith: Tibetan Buddhists, Christians and Catholics loyal to Rome, and most notoriously, Muslim Uighurs herded into “reeducation” camps in Xinjiang. Until recently, Beijing brutally enforced a one-child policy through forced abortion, for example.
The Communist bosses are no humanitarians. Neither are they friends of ours. Beijing views the West generally, and the U.S. specifically, as commercial rivals and military adversaries, for reasons going back to China’s humiliations during the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century, the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.
Its leaders do not believe that ours are owed the truth on any subject, much less a sensitive one that might involve admissions of incompetence or wrongdoing and perceived loss of face on China’s part. The presence of Chinese biological warfare labs with spotty safety records in Wuhan may be pertinent: A Soviet bio-war lab in Sverdlovsk leaked anthrax in 1979, killing at least 100 people in another incident that communists lied about.
Furthermore, China is a police state whose security services keep close tabs on foreigners. Western officials in China are no doubt seeking ground-truth to report home about coronavirus. But it is equally likely that they are finding it difficult, not to say dangerous, to collect that information in Wuhan, from which U.S. diplomats and others are now being evacuated.
So, we don’t know what we don’t know.
Despite the economic and political tensions between our two countries, Americans wish all the best for the Chinese people in their public health crisis. They are fellow human beings and as many believe, fellow children of God made in His image. We all hope the people diagnosed in the U.S. survive and their cases are the full extent of our own exposure.
Yet what if they are not?
Some accused the Obama administration of taking too laissez faire of an attitude toward the 2014 Ebola outbreak that jumped from Africa to the U.S., but, fortunately, that did not turn into an epidemic here. If the best medical advice of career professionals at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases soon suggests that a temporary pause on the admission of travelers from China might be wise, at least until this outbreak burns itself out, the Trump administration should act decisively under Section 1182 authorities.
Beijing would howl, and Sino-American commerce and diplomacy would suffer. But the preservation of life in the U.S. ought to be our paramount concern — not foreign sensitivities, anyone’s narrow economic interests, or the political chimera of a comprehensive fair-trade deal with China before the 2020 election.
And perhaps the legal precedent accidentally established by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller’s misadventure in 2017 can now be put to far better use by public health officials today.
Kevin Carroll was a senior counselor to the secretary of Homeland Security, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and a CIA and Army officer. He is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
