President Joe Biden issued a proclamation on Friday that instituted a travel ban beginning Monday. Just call it Biden’s African travel ban.
The ban will restrict noncitizens from entering the United States from South Africa, Botswana, Eswatini (Swaziland), Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, according to the proclamation.
When Biden was on the campaign trail, he took a different tone about travel bans in the name of health and safety when his predecessor implemented them. He inferred such acts were racist and xenophobic.
On Feb. 1, 2020, then-candidate Biden tweeted about Trump’s initial coronavirus-related travel ban in the early days of the outbreak.
“Trump further diminished the U.S. in the eyes of the world by expanding his travel ban,” Biden wrote at the time. “This new ‘African Ban’ is designed to make it harder for black and brown people to immigrate to the United States. It’s a disgrace, and we cannot let him succeed.”
Pot, meet “disgraceful” kettle.
On March 12, 2020, Biden tweeted, “A wall will not stop the coronavirus. Banning all travel from Europe — or any part of the world — will not stop it. This disease could impact every nation and any person on the planet — and we need a plan to combat it.”
Biden’s inflammatory rhetorical campaign against travel bans drew a lot of support among Democrats at the time. Incidentally, these same Democrats are now among the quietest regarding Biden’s Africa travel ban.
Then-Sen. Kamala Harris also chimed in, echoing Biden’s claims. Harris, who has a history of making emotionally charged accusations of racism only to turn out to be wrong (see Jussie Smollett), tweeted: “Trump’s extended un-American travel ban undermines our nation’s core values. It is clearly driven by hate, not security.”
Pelosi issued a statement condemning Trump’s travel ban on Jan. 30, 2020: “The Trump Administration’s expansion of its outrageous, un-American travel ban threatens our security, our values and the rule of law. The sweeping rule, barring more than 350 million individuals from predominantly African nations from traveling to the United States, is discrimination disguised as policy … With this latest callous decision, the President has doubled down on his cruelty and further undermined our global leadership, our Constitution and our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants.
Pelosi even did a photo shoot at San Francisco’s Chinatown to downplay any concerns, rather than take the spread of COVID-19 seriously.
Biden not only claimed Trump’s travel ban would not work, but he also insinuated it was xenophobic.
“We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fearmongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency,” Biden tweeted on Feb. 1, 2020.
Biden has a history of stealing other people’s ideas and claiming them as his own. But this instance is especially revealing.
By adopting a similar travel ban to Trump’s and for the very same reasons, Biden reveals his rhetoric is empty. The only thing he cared about was creating hatred, fear, and division in the country so he could win an election. His persistence in this hypocrisy helps illustrate how Biden’s and Democrats’ accusations of racism don’t need to be true, so long as they achieve their aim: to increase racial hatred and tension in hopes of using irrational fear to convince millions of nonwhites to vote for them.
This should illustrate how dangerous Biden is — a pure, unscrupulous demagogue with no substance, certainly unfit to tackle the nation’s worst health crisis in over a century.
