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Comment by actually_a_dog | Hacker News Reader

I agree with about 95% of this, but, I don't think "travel bans got a bad name because you-know-who proposed them." I think they got a bad name because you-know-who proposed them previously, targeting countries with you-know-what religion, for a political reason. Had it been just "we're going to reduce air traffic into the country to slow the spread of the virus," I don't think that would have been terribly controversial.

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It's also worth noting that a lot of the narrative makes it sound like people called him racist for the ban, but it was mostly his use of "Kung-flu" and "china virus" that people had an issue with, not the ban itself.

This is absolutely not true. Every public figure left of center in the country commented viciously about the racist, stupid travel ban.

Source please. Find me a prominent politician that specifically called the China travel ban itself racist or xenophobic.

If every politician did it, it must be easy to find a clip.

Oh, I did not read the thread closely enough. The muslim country travel ban, yes, there are many examples. China, not that I know of.

For the other ban, the fact that he called it a "muslim ban" and the specific countries that were picked is what made it racist and ineffective. It's hard to claim it's for security when they didn't include UAE, KSA, Egypt or Lebanon where the 9/11 hijackers were from [0]. It also happened to exclude all muslim countries where Trump has business in.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijackers_in_the_September_11_...

So yes, it had no other purpose than being racist. Just like Trump didn't really care to use the time bought by the Chinese travel ban to actually develop tests or ramp up PPE. It always was a show rooted in xenophobia.

Joe Biden called it "hysterical xenophobia and fear mongering [against] science." Pelosi was on the ground in San Fransisco's Chinatown with similar words. Maxine Waters too, though she had been talking that way since 2015, predicting every possible racist act.

The official record is better, though. This bill calls out travel discrimination based on national origin: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/2214...

No, it was because the 'ban' still allowed thousands of people from China to arrive from China in spit of the so-called 'ban'.

This was a missed opportunity. Have one group mask up for the China virus* and one for covid, with masks indicating which group you belonged to. Make it a competition to see who can wear the most masks.

* we have always named diseases from where they are found, and China/Wuhan virus would have been more catchy. However that hurt the pride of Xi and suddenly we all changed our minds.

Yeah, people forget the muslim ban happened before COVID.

People also forget that it wasn’t a Muslim ban. The world’s largest Muslim country was not included in it.

Well, those excluded countries included places where Trump had business interests and longtime allies of the US (Saudi Arabia). https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-trump-immigration-ba...

So it wasn't a Muslim ban then?

Just because it doesn’t target all muslim majority countries doesn’t mean it didn’t target solely muslim majority countries.

Please just say "Trump" and "Muslims" and don't do the Voldemort / Macbeth thing.

It failed to apply to populous or notorious Muslim countries like Indonesia or Pakistan, only to those which Obama had previously put on a list. It got a bad name for political reasons, not for the facts of the executive order.

The China travel ban wasn't opposed, it was ineffective because it was both late, and then they wasted all the useful time you could've gotten by not stopping indirect travel or travel from Europe where it was already spreading at the time.

By the time a European travel ban was created, it was basically pointless because spread within the US was at wildfire levels compared to any possible contribution from international travel (the question of the morality of forcing flight crews to expose themselves to a deadly novel virus is of course quite a different one).

The story of the Trump pandemic response is taking weak action months too late.

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