The 75‑Country Visa Ban Is a Tariff on People, Paid in Human Lives

The policy is, in its outline, brutally simple. A secretary of state instructed consular officers to refuse immigrant visas to persons from seventy‑five countries, all, we are told, in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, or Eastern Europe. The stated reason was not that these people had committed crimes, carried contagion, or plotted violence, but that they would be more likely than others to “extract wealth” or “take welfare and public benefits” from the United States. A judge has now ruled that this near‑blanket prohibition, touching almost two‑fifths of the world’s countries, violated a statute forbidding discrimination by nationality and exceeded the secretary’s lawful authority. The grand scheme was sweeping in its ambition and remarkably careless in its legal footing.

When I wrote of the division of labour in the pin‑workshop, I argued that such prodigious improvement in skill and productivity is everywhere limited by the extent of the market. A policy that prevents buyers and sellers, workers and employers, from even meeting is therefore a kind of prohibition, not upon pins or cloth, but upon the very enlargement of the market on which opulence depends. These visa denials freeze the labour and talents of thousands who would have worked, produced, and consumed in America, and likewise the gains their partners there would have made in employing them. To narrow the circle within which men may exchange their labour is to renounce, in cold blood, a part of the wealth they might have created together.

The supposed benefit is singular and visible: the government claims to have shielded its public purse from a class of foreigners imagined peculiarly prone to dependency. The costs are noiseless and dispersed. They fall upon the would‑be immigrant whose lawful application is frozen; upon the spouse, parent, or child left waiting on the other shore; upon the employer who never interviews the worker whose name never appears; and upon the consumer who pays a little more for goods and services that might have been produced more cheaply. No one of these sufferers can easily prove what he has lost, yet altogether they pay far more than any taxpayer has been rescued from the alleged depredations of these excluded strangers.

The fiction on which the ban was premised—that residents of the targeted nations are particularly likely to live upon public resources—confounds self‑interest with sloth, and prudence with rapacity. In The Wealth of Nations I observed that we obtain our dinner from the butcher, brewer, and baker not from their benevolence but from their regard to their own interest, and that this ordinary self‑love, under equal laws, becomes a powerful principle of order and improvement. The immigrant, no less than the native, generally seeks higher wages, better prospects for his children, and some security of right. If the rules of admission and of relief are well contrived, they harness that self‑interest into labour and contribution; if they are badly contrived, they may indeed encourage idleness. To assume, in advance of any individual examination, that millions must be paupers is to confess not their moral weakness but the legislator’s want of imagination.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments I asked my reader to consult an impartial spectator, a well‑informed and disinterested observer, when judging the propriety of any action. What would such a spectator say to a rule that obliges officers to reject a diligent applicant even when they have determined, case by case, that she is likely to be self‑sufficient? He would see a multitude of men and women, some enterprising, some ordinary, some perhaps feeble, all treated as identical because they share a passport. He would see families sundered though they have followed every lawful step prescribed to them. He would note that the law itself demanded non‑discrimination by nationality, and that officials, in their zeal, marched beyond even this boundary. Praise may attend such harshness in certain circles; praise‑worthiness does not.

There is, too, a familiar political scent about this measure. When merchants in my own day petitioned for restraints upon foreign goods, they seldom professed to be guarding their own profits; they spoke instead of the nation’s independence, the honour of the flag, the preservation of good wages. I counselled my readers then to receive such requests with the most suspicious attention, for they commonly concealed a conspiracy against the public in favour of a particular order of men. Here the object of exclusion is not foreign cloth but foreign workers; yet the interests align. Incumbent labour and capital are spared the competition of strangers; the price is paid by consumers, by would‑be entrants, and by the overall progress of industry. It is a tariff upon people, levied in hope of votes rather than revenue.

The judge who struck down the ban did so on narrow legal grounds: the statute, she reasoned, forbade this nationality‑based discrimination and granted no such sweeping power to a single minister. In this she discharged one of the state’s proper duties, the exact administration of justice, by recalling an over‑zealous officer to the limits of his commission. That such a correction was necessary ought itself to chasten the authors of the policy. They sought to rearrange, at a stroke, the lives of families across seventy‑five countries, as if the great chess‑board of human society contained only passive pieces and not men and women with principles of motion of their own. To correct so arrogant a move is not an act of sentiment, but of sobriety.

I do not say that any country is bound to admit all who wish to enter it, at all times, on any terms; that would be to forget both prudence and the legitimate burdens of public finance. I do say that to exclude vast multitudes in gross, without regard to individual character or capacity, upon a speculative fear of future alms‑giving, is both wasteful and unjust. It diminishes the annual produce of the land and labour, it affronts the feelings of the impartial spectator, and it habituates rulers to treat whole nations as if they were a single suspect person. A nation that grows accustomed to such habits will one day discover that it has not only fewer strangers within its gates, but fewer friends abroad and fewer virtues at home.