Last week, the Trump administration announced it “is weighing a new rule that would temporarily block an American citizen or legal permanent resident from returning to the United States from abroad if authorities believe the person might be infected with the coronavirus.”
The administration has already restricted entry of foreigners and some legal residents of the US, but this would be the first time it has sought to deny entry for US citizens, including the many thousands of US citizens who cross the US-Mexico border in both directions every day.
It is highly questionable whether this is constitutional, as the US Constitution has long been interpreted in a way that assumed US citizens cannot be denied entry into their own country.
Indeed, in recent decades, countries of the developed world have generally proven unwilling to deny entry to their own citizens, and have taken steps to avoid rendering any person stateless. Even in cases of new immigrants, some countries, such as Switzerland, have provisions in place to expedite legal residency for migrants who might be rendered stateless if denied entry.
The Trump administration’s suggestion that it may now deny citizens entry represents a departure from this now well-established legal and political trend.
But one of the victories of the classical liberals in recent centuries has been their successful opposition to regimes’ insistence that they can deny entry to their own citizens if those persons are deemed undesirable in some way.
This tactic has often been employed as a means of exiling political enemies and manipulating demographics for political gain.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, the Russian state, which generally discouraged emigration, sought to encourage Jews to leave Russia permanently. As noted by historian Tara Zahra: “It was possible to acquire an ‘emigrant’ passport for free, but this was a one-way ticket, since return was forbidden. That meant virtually cutting off family ties, and brought the risk of statelessness if a migrant was rejected or deported by American immigration authorities.” (See Zahra’s The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World [New York: W.W. Norton, 2016])
In later decades, of course, those who defected under the Soviet communist regimes might find themselves denied reentry later on.
Other examples include the Manchu dynasty of China, which had at times “forbidden emigration and considered all outside China as having lost their nationality. Their return was forbidden.”
Under the French revolutionaries, émigrés were at times denied reentry depending on the whims of those in power during the Directory and the Consulate.
During the days of the Spanish inquisition, Jews were encouraged to leave Spain during the 1490s but were denied reentry after 1499.
During the years of Hutu dominance in Rwanda, many Tutsi émigrés were later denied reentry. Only after Tutsi rebels finally subdued the Hutu militias following the genocide did many of these Tutsis finally return.
Now, I’m not saying the Trump administration is seeking to implement a crypto-ethnic-cleansing policy or some other nefarious scheme of that variety. However, the proposition that the US government ought to have the power to simply deny entry to US citizens who are neither criminals nor have received any sort of rigorous due process is dangerous and empowers regimes to deny citizens the most basic property rights. These rights include a citizen’s right to access to his own property and to visit his family. The very idea ought to be rejected outright as a gross violation of an American’s right to travel freely. There is a reason why, historically, denial of reentry for citizens is associated with authoritarians and despots, such as the French republicans and the czars of old.
