Donald Trump has inevitably made coronavirus about immigration. “In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens,” Trump tweeted, “I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!” Nativism renders this “invisible enemy” visible in the form of human beings who can be painted as a threat and blamed for our problems.

Staff then rushed to draft an executive order that comports with Trump’s tweet. But travel bans already covered Europe and China, land borders with Mexico and Canada were mostly closed, unauthorized border crossers were automatically deported, refugee resettlement was globally suspended, and ordinary visa processing was frozen. That’s on top of Trump’s prior banning of people from Muslim-majority and African countries, slashing refugee admissions, and forcing asylum seekers to remain in Mexico. Immigration had already been all but halted.

Nativism has always thrived by providing visible substitutes for 'invisible enemies'

It turns out, however, that exceptions will be made for guest workers. That’s because nativism have always run up against business’ demand for labor. This emergency, however, could reset the contours of that debate, just as the first world war-era red scare weakened business opposition to restriction, facilitating the passage of the national origins quotas, which sharply limited immigration along brazenly racist lines from the 1920s through 1965. This is the golden age that nativists like Stephen Miller take inspiration from.

Trump is moving to hermetically seal the country, making real the fantastic promise of his pledged “impenetrable WALL”. What ordinary politics could not secure, a global pandemic has delivered: a nativist, if temporary and ad hoc, fever dream. It could get much worse, and more permanent, too.

Coronavirus has accelerated the dynamics that enabled Trump’s nativist presidency and the global rise of the far right. The countries that long benefited from global dominance have for decades failed to broadly redistribute empire’s benefits to their citizens: neoliberalism decimated worker power, stagnated wages, and funeled wealth to the richest. The same geopolitics that delivered such massive wealth and power to the global north also led to the mass arrival of migrants. Without a powerful left, nativist nationalism is the interpretative frame that won out. Nativism has always thrived by providing visible substitutes for “invisible enemies,” from the abstract violence of global capitalism to the US empire raging against its unexpected limits.

Since the Clinton administration, business has been content with a bipartisan war on “illegal immigrants” and the militarization of the border as long legal immigration remained untouched. While Trump has failed to secure legislative cuts to legal immigration, he has done a lot to restrict it administratively. Covid-19 provides him with incredible new opportunities. But the guest worker exemption shows that business still wields ample power in the conservative coalition, and that racist and culture war policy must bend to the profit imperative.

Trump and his allies have celebrated the ban in the language of rightwing populism, emphasizing its purported economic benefits for working-class Americans. In court, however, the executive order will likely be defended on the same national security grounds that were successfully marshalled to defend the Muslim ban, this time under the guise of the nation’s public health.

The pandemic, of course, has exposed the inescapability of human sociality and proven the libertarian premise that every man is an island to be a lie

The pandemic, of course, has exposed the inescapability of human sociality and proven the libertarian premise that every man is an island to be a lie. Nationalism’s promise to protect Americans behind secure borders has likewise been shown to be empty: as long as coronavirus exists in one place it threatens every place. But contrary evidence has never easily demolished powerful ideologies.

Instead, the trajectory of the pandemic will, if left unchecked, reaffirm the very status quo that is facilitating its spread. The same global inequalities that drive immigration and facilitate the xenophobic response to it could create a situation where the virus is tamed in the global north while it ravages the global south. Massive outbreaks in poor countries could then lead to this temporary shutdown in human movement transitioning into a more permanent system that locks much of the poor world behind a massive cordon sanitaire.

If Trump’s suspension of immigration survives legal challenge, creating this new multi-tiered system of travel and immigration restriction will only require that he selectively lift bans on particular countries. Declaring wealthy countries as “corona-free” would provide a facially non-discriminatory public health pretext for enacting a fundamentally racist program. The only way to exit the nativist hellscape is to fight for a redistribution of the resources that the global south needs to fight the pandemic. The struggle against the xenophobic far-right is now also fundamentally a fight for a globally just response to Covid-19, including massive debt relief. The solution to a global pandemic must be global in scope. If it’s not, Trump’s makeshift solution will be to further split the world into pieces.