President Donald Trump on Wednesday moved to ban the entry of citizens of 12 countries into the U.S.Gregory Bull/The Associated Press
“Close the borders! Don’t let any of them in!” You’re meant to picture the leader shouting this into an old-style telephone in a smoke-filled room, then a cut to scenes of tollgates being lowered, armed sentries standing in watchtowers, rolls of razor wire being stretched across streets and airplanes turning back.
In reality, border closings and travel bans generally have the opposite of their intended effect, causing mass rushes to beat the ban and sharp increases in illegal migration.
There are effective ways to use policy to stop unwanted movements across the border – but this ain’t it.
In his order this week to ban entry to the United States by citizens of 12 countries, Donald Trump was ostensibly responding to a genuinely horrific hate crime committed against American Jews in Boulder, Col., the previous week, allegedly by an Egyptian man who grew up in Kuwait. So it is only one of the absurdities of his action that the list of countries on the travel ban does not include Egypt or Kuwait.
Rather, it bans a hodgepodge of countries, most in Africa, with little in common. Notably, several of the countries have refused his farfetched proposals to send them people deported from the United States.
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The Trump ban does not target the major sources, or causes, of irregular or unwanted immigration. But it also doesn’t do anything at all about the problem of violent extremism, despite Mr. Trump’s order claiming it will “protect its citizens from terrorist attacks and other national security or public-safety threats.” That, on its face, is a bare-minimum baseline of immigration policy.
It is fair to say that no government wants criminals or terrorists entering their country, or even people with a psychological profile or history of extremism that might point to such acts. That is why regular immigration and asylum systems include screening processes – in fact, the United States already has exceptionally robust and extensive screening processes – to keep such people out.
And they are very successful: the rate of criminality, including terrorism and extremism, among immigrants and refugees to the United States (and to Canada) is dramatically lower than among the native-born population, to the extent that increasing the immigration rate has been shown repeatedly to measurably decrease the crime rate.
That’s part of the reason why domestic terrorists in North America and Europe are mostly people who were radicalized within their country of residence, using ideas that were circulating within domestic circles. The explosion of antisemitic violence in the United States is not the result of immigration. Quite the opposite, it’s a homegrown problem; some of its deadliest perpetrators have been Americans who got their hateful thinking from Mr. Trump’s ideological circles.
It’s also an important reason why immigration should be kept within normal, controlled channels – so that families can be selected from a pool of applicants, and those selected can be screened. People who are flaky or marginal or hiding something are far less likely to come to your country uninvited if they are subject to a regular immigration system – applying, even with a strong chance of rejection, is far less expensive or risky than simply showing up and taking your chances. An effectively functioning program for regular immigration is the most powerful deterrent.
A complete ban of a country’s people, or a closure of legal border crossings to significant populations, does the opposite. It inverts the risk equation by reducing the odds of a legal, controlled application succeeding to zero. And therefore the comparative benefit of sneaking in or simply showing up or overstaying rises infinitely. In other words: bans strongly incentivize illegal immigration.
That should be well known to American leaders by this point. Despite the walling-off of the southern border and closure of most forms of legal entry and asylum at its crossings under Mr. Trump in his first term and continuing under Joe Biden, the proportion of irregular entries and dangerous smuggled crossings rose. They were reduced to negligible levels in 2024, mainly through judicious use of limited legal pathways.
The Safe Third Country Agreement has the same effect in Canada: By completely banning entire categories of people from any regular-entry application, however unlikely its success, it creates a powerful incentive structure to make dangerous irregular walks across the border. Therefore, when people seek to flee Mr. Trump’s policies, as they did in his first term, they seek to come through fields, forests and lakes, at great risk.
A restricted, controlled immigration system is good for everyone, including immigrants. But restriction becomes a perverse incentive to illegality, as Mr. Trump keeps failing to learn, if you reduce the target to zero.