This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, May 16, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Travel bans at least at this point aren't going to do much to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Nonetheless, the Trump administration persists. the doesn't hold much weight either. Most categories of skilled workers are being

prevented from immigrating right now. Cato's David Beer discusses travel and

immigration restrictions in the wake of this outbreak. The Trump

administration has made a huge deal out of the fact that it, you know, in its own words,

decisively took action to prevent certain nationalities from traveling to the United States.

And yet we've seen massive amounts of travel from elsewhere of areas that have been that were early on affected by

coronavirus in fact travel to the United States extensively so what do we what do we

know about that now well you're looking at the numbers of airport admissions

recorded by the governments as of April 7th nearly 10.7 million entries at US airports originated from countries with

confirmed COVID-19 cases. So basically the travel bans, the restrictions, everything the Trump administration did was so late that it could not possibly have made any difference in the ultimate outcomes.

You know, our research has shown that the government waited on average more than two and a half weeks after a country had a confirmed

case to impose any restrictions and for more than two dozen countries it waited a month or more and in fact three times it

waited two months or more so really you know the amount of time the number of entries that have occurred it was inevitable that the

disease would be transmitted so the idea that these restrictions were imposed very early on, you know, ahead of the curve,

so to speak, was just not accurate, it's still not accurate.

And even after the restrictions were put in place

travel is continued because the travel restrictions don't affect US

citizens or permanent residents of the United States.

And so we've seen travel continue

...