This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 22nd, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Whenever a president makes a bold pronouncement,

it's worth figuring out just what has changed.

As is often the case, the President's most recent invective declaring a temporary prohibition

on legal immigration both misunderstands how pandemics work and doesn't really change much about current immigration

policy.

Cato's Alex Narasta comments.

President Trump tweeted that it was, he wanted to ban immigration to prevent the spread,

further spread of the disease to the United States, and to protect jobs in this

record time of high unemployment as a response to the virus.

So sort of two justifications there.

Neither of them really work.

First off, the virus is already here.

The United States already has the highest number of cases

and deaths of any country in the world.

And travel bans only really work

to stop the spread of disease if you somehow stop it before the disease

has been seated in other countries around the world.

So it's obviously too late for that.

And then on the second point immigrants are disproportionately employed in a lot of the

essential services that the Department of Homeland Security and states have

...