When the COVID-19 virus began spreading across the world, five years ago, countries handled the crisis in myriad ways. Some locked down their populations; some encouraged testing, masking, and social distancing; some traced the outbreaks to cut off new infections; and some did almost nothing at all. But amid this variety of domestic public health measures, nearly every country pursued one common policy: closing their borders.
Conservatives and liberals alike embraced border closures. U.S. President Donald Trump bragged in his first term that partially closing the U.S. border to China in February 2020 had saved “potentially millions of lives.” New Zealand’s progressive Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, justifying the country’s strict border closures, warned in 2021 that “the rest of the world simply poses too great a risk for our health and our economy.” China, where the virus first emerged, protested those border closures that targeted its citizens, but then shut the country to the world in March 2020 and kept it closed for nearly three years.
Pandemics are a classic global problem that knows no borders; containing disease outbreaks requires countries to cooperate on effective responses. Instead, COVID-19 supercharged the dangerous fallacy that border restrictions are a panacea for a wide gamut of threats, including drugs, infectious disease, and illegal migration. The track record of border closures is largely one of failure with enormous collateral consequences. Border restrictions do little to protect citizens from danger while they harm those with compelling reasons to cross borders. Yet countries keep doubling down on this ineffective approach.
In the United States, both political parties now favor tougher border restrictions, from hard border closures to unprecedented limits on the right to seek asylum. Trump has now imposed 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico over their failure to “secure the border” against fentanyl smuggling and illegal migration. In the European Union, the bedrock principle of free movement across borders has been chipped away, most recently by Germany’s reimposition of border checks to impede would-be asylum seekers.
Yet there is little to show for decades of expensive efforts to secure borders. The United States now has five times as many Border Patrol agents at its southern border as it did 30 years ago, along with more than 700 miles of fencing and elaborate surveillance capabilities. But the number of illegal border crossings in 2023 was the highest on record. With increasing displacement caused by war, civil violence, famine, and climate catastrophe, the pressures at borders across the world are unprecedented. Europe has tried for a decade to deter migrants from Africa and the Middle East from crossing the Mediterranean Sea, but the number of migrant arrivals in 2023 and 2024 were the highest on the continent since the enormous surge during Europe’s “migrant crisis” in 2015 and 2016.
Border closures also produce extremely harmful consequences, separating families, weakening international cooperation, eroding civil liberties, and leading to more deaths as desperate migrants take dangerous risks to evade restrictions. Tight border restrictions may deter some desperate migrants, but many others will brave dangerous crossings of the Mediterranean Sea or the Sonoran Desert. In 2023, more than 3,000 migrants died in the Mediterranean and more than 700 died along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Border-first approaches may be increasingly popular—and politically appealing—but they are certain to fail, and to hurt many innocent people in the process. Governments cannot solve the problems of disease, drugs, and illegal immigration by simply battening down the hatches. The challenges that come with living in an interconnected world require more than resorting to the false comfort of border control.
LOCK IT DOWN
The pandemic was a test case for the effectiveness of border restrictions in a crisis. Never before had so many countries in the world closed their borders so securely and for so long. Beginning in late January 2020 and expanding dramatically by the end of March 2020, almost every country used border closures and other travel restrictions to some degree. Traditional border health screening tools, such as temperature checks, quickly proved useless because many of those infected did not show symptoms. Leaders grappled with a stark choice, knowing only that a swift response was vital. In the face of immense uncertainty, many governments felt they had to close their borders quickly and sort out the consequences later.
In some island countries where borders were relatively easy to close, restrictions almost certainly saved lives, although they worked best alongside other public health interventions. Countries with long land borders faced much greater challenges: China was able to keep COVID-19 largely at bay for over two years, but was ultimately overwhelmed by the more contagious Omicron variant. In North America, Europe, Africa, and Latin America, COVID-19 crossed borders easily despite restrictions.
Closing borders came with enormous costs. Japan blocked migrants with work permits and longtime permanent residents from coming home if they were out of the country when the border was shut. In the most stringent clampdowns, governments in Australia and New Zealand barred the entry of noncitizens and prevented some of their own citizens, including children and pregnant women, from returning home. Canada and the United States, which for over 150 years proudly proclaimed that they share “the world’s longest undefended border,” shut down crossings in March 2020 to all but “essential traffic” for more than 18 months.
On the oceangoing container ships that kept locked-down residents across the world supplied with food, toilet paper, electronics, and home exercise equipment, crews were trapped at sea for months on end, barred by border closures from leaving their ships at any of their ports of call. By September 2020, some 400,000 ship workers were unable to disembark despite having worked beyond their contracts, leading the Consumer Goods Forum, a global lobbying group representing giant importers such as Unilever, Carrefour, and Tesco, to claim that border restrictions had “inadvertently created a modern form of forced labor” for cargo ship workers.
There is little to show for decades of expensive efforts to secure borders.
Such unfortunate consequences of border shutdowns might have been inevitable as governments scrambled to take necessary measures in desperate times. But many of the governments that shut their borders refused to take even simple domestic steps to reduce the spread of the virus, worrying that those measures would be politically unpopular at home. The first Trump administration mishandled or actively undermined measures, such as public testing and masking, that could have slowed the spread of the disease. And many of the governments that did better in reducing infections and deaths kept travel restrictions in place even as the threat of COVID-19 receded. In New Zealand, the government was still preventing not just foreigners but also many of its own citizens from returning home as late as January 2022, when 90 percent of the population was vaccinated.
By contrast, countries that used flexible border measures as part of a public health strategy that included mass testing, masking, and contact tracing curbed the spread of COVID-19 while minimizing other harms. South Korea was among the few countries that did not close its borders to travelers from affected countries. In doing so, it became the best example of how targeted public health measures, combined with sensible mobility restrictions such as quarantine requirements and bans on large gatherings, could contain a highly contagious virus. South Korea was the first country to roll out effective tests on a national scale—at a time when tests in the United States were still scarce and inaccurate. The country’s public health service also had an efficient contact tracing system, allowing it to stamp out a massive outbreak in February 2020 at the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in Daegu, the country’s fourth-largest city. Even as the virus was spreading in China, however, South Korea refused to impose a stringent travel ban. Instead, the government sent special charter flights to Wuhan to repatriate citizens and their Chinese spouses and families, incurring a widespread public backlash for doing so. Health Minister Park Neung-hoo replied to critics by calling it “the basic national duty to take care of our people isolated in a far foreign land while facing fears of disease.”
South Korea showed that even a deadly foreign threat such as COVID-19 could be contained (and that a country could uphold its responsibility to protect its citizens) without closing borders. Other countries should follow its lead when dealing with the next public health emergency or with other challenges related to the movement of people and goods across borders.
TEAR DOWN THAT WALL
COVID-19 showed the limitations of border-first approaches to disease control, but the lesson is much more widely applicable. When governments seek to address any threat that comes from abroad—including diseases, harmful drugs, terrorism, and unauthorized migration—border control is only one of the range of measures that constitute an effective response.
U.S. border agents, for example, regularly interdict shipments of heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, and other harmful drugs. But such seizures at the border have not made an appreciable dent in American drug consumption. Domestic demand for these drugs remains steady. Studies of U.S. efforts to interrupt the flow of drugs from abroad, including the government’s own assessments, have shown that interdiction has had no noticeable effect on the supply available in the United States despite massive increases in funding for seizures. For fentanyl, which is relatively easy for traffickers to conceal, research by immigration policy analyst David Bier showed that border controls were not just ineffective but harmful. When the U.S. government closed the border with Mexico to nonessential travel in March 2020, drug traffickers switched from cocaine and heroin to fentanyl, which was easier to transport undetected in the small number of “essential” vehicles permitted to cross. Deaths of Americans from fentanyl overdoses doubled between 2019 and 2021.
Border measures have played an important role in the U.S. and global response to terrorist threats since the September 11 attacks, but only because governments came to recognize that border controls were one component of a much larger toolkit. After a brief shutdown that temporarily crippled key cross-border industries and ground crossings to a halt, the United States and Canada negotiated a detailed set of cooperative commitments known as the Smart Border Declaration. To try to prevent terrorist crossings without disrupting lawful trade and travel, the two governments agreed to coordinate visa policies, develop tamper-proof passports, share advanced information on incoming passengers, and expand “trusted traveler” measures such as the prescreening program NEXUS to separate border crossers who had been carefully vetted by the two governments from those who required greater scrutiny. In the commercial sphere, companies agreed to secure their supply chains and share advanced cargo information with border officials to increase security and make crossings faster. The innovations were enduring and played a role in keeping commercial traffic moving freely during the COVID-19 border closures.
The story with unauthorized migration and asylum seekers arriving at the border has been much the same: unilateral border control measures have been disruptive and unsuccessful, while more sophisticated carrot-and-stick approaches and cooperation with neighbors have yielded promising results. The United States and Europe have at times been able to reduce unauthorized migration through deterrent measures at their borders, but these restrictions rely on harsh and often violent means that endanger vulnerable migrant populations. Europe has made greater progress by offering more legal opportunities for migration and cooperating with Libya, Turkey, and other neighboring nations to discourage dangerous sea crossings by asylum seekers. In the United States, during the first Trump administration, threats to build a border wall, the separation of some migrant parents from their children, and the Remain in Mexico program that forced many asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their U.S. immigration court hearings, initially had some deterrent effect. But in fiscal year 2019, before the COVID shutdowns, the number of border crossing attempts surged to levels unseen since the early 2000s.
When Biden took office, he lifted many of those deterrents, and the result was an unprecedented surge of border crossers. The administration was slow to develop an effective border control strategy, which almost certainly hurt the Democrats in the 2024 elections. But beginning in early 2023, it unveiled policies designed to flip the incentives at the border. With some exceptions for those facing the greatest dangers in their countries of origin, the United States began to deny asylum claims from any migrants crossing the border illegally between the ports of entry. But it also began admitting 30,000 migrants each month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, using the president’s “parole” authority, which lets him grant migrants temporary legal status in the United States. The administration persuaded Mexico to tighten its southern border, reducing the number of migrants heading north, and Canada agreed to take in more refugees from the Western Hemisphere. The United States also set up refugee processing facilities in Colombia and other countries in Central and South America to give those fleeing turmoil and violence an alternative to the dangerous trip to the U.S. southern border. And the government expanded the use of a smartphone app known as CBP One that made it easier for asylum seekers to file their claims through the legal ports of entry. By late 2024, unauthorized border crossings had fallen 77 percent from the December 2023 peak, one of the steepest declines ever recorded.
THE FIRES NEXT TIME
With few exceptions, rigid border controls should be understood as a failure of governments to deploy more effective and less harmful measures to address the problems that come with the imperatives of movement in an interconnected world. Better approaches require cooperation with neighboring states, coordinated health measures, aid to countries that migrants are leaving, international law enforcement and intelligence cooperation, better legal channels for movement, and other measures to marry greater border security with more nuanced policy tools.
Sadly, the public seems to lack the patience for such efforts, and there is no shortage of politicians promising quick fixes through border closures. The current Trump administration is busy undoing Biden’s border innovations, reverting to those policies that rely solely on deterrence and which failed to deliver during Trump’s first term. The administration has already ended the parole programs for Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela and is promising to fast-track deportations of many of those people admitted in the Biden era. It has shut down the CBP One app, leaving many migrants who had been following the U.S. government’s procedures for lawful admission stranded in Mexico with no way to enter the United States legally. Trump’s contentious relations with allies, including his tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and other U.S. partners, are weakening the cooperative measures needed to ensure that terrorists do not exploit weaknesses in border and travel controls. The successor to the U.S.-Canadian Smart Border Accords, known as the Beyond the Border initiative, died in 2017 after Trump first took office. It was not revived under Biden, and the two countries seem increasingly determined to go their own ways on border management; Canada is currently gearing up for a flood of migrants heading north to flee the new U.S. administration’s mass deportation plan.
The prospects for a better U.S. response to the next pandemic are even dimmer. Trump’s attacks on the civil service have stripped the government of the experienced public officials needed to manage public health responses; cuts to USAID, for example, have frozen its work in Africa to contain Marburg virus, monkeypox, and other diseases with pandemic potential. Despite the first human death from bird flu in the United States reported in January 2025, the Trump administration has fired CDC officials working to contain the outbreak. The U.S. Department of Agriculture accidentally terminated several frontline officials involved in managing the virus that has devastated poultry flocks and driven up egg prices, and is only now attempting to rehire them after public outrage. With the likelihood of extreme epidemics in the coming decades increasing due to the effects of climate change, the United States will be even less prepared for the next pandemic than it was for COVID-19. And closing borders again, which Trump will surely do in the event of another pandemic, will be no more effective than it was five years ago.
Though his rhetoric and actions are particularly extreme, Trump is far from alone in his single-minded fixation on borders. Too many governments around the world are resorting to border restrictions rather than doing the hard work needed to shore up public health systems, manage migration, cooperate on counter-terrorism, and protect against drug trafficking. Instead of investing in the infrastructure needed to actually address these complex issues, leaders seek the comfort of the simple solution—shutting borders—and in the process only compound their problems.
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