Late on Friday evening, Donald Trump issued a proclamation that bans immigrants who cannot prove they will have health care coverage or the means to pay for “reasonably foreseeable medical costs” within 30 days of their arrival to the United States.
What is a “reasonably foreseeable” cost? Of course, the executive order doesn’t offer exact numbers. In practice, as explained at Vox, the individual consular officers who evaluate visa requirements and the State Department would make the call on a case by case basis. Which is rife for discrimination and bias.
This proclamation covers a lot of ground, and not all of it is clearly laid out. Let’s go over what we do know first. This order refers to legal immigrants who would be applying for visas. Specifically, this includes spouses and parents of U.S. citizens and the immediate family of permanent residents.
Who doesn’t it apply to? Refugees, asylum-seekers, and the non-citizen children of U.S. citizens.
Notably, Medicaid doesn’t count. Nor can immigrants qualify for the visa, under this new proclamation, if they would be using the Affordable Care Act subsidies in order to purchase said insurance.
Even with a few exemptions, this new ban will largely impact low-income immigrants, who can often have a difficult time receiving a visa to visit the U.S. anyway. Relatedly, Trump is already working to make that harder, too.
Elizabeth Jamae, an immigration attorney at San Francisco's Pearl Law Group, made the same distinction to NBC News, explaining, "I don’t necessarily think this will affect your average immigrant coming to work at a tech company. It will affect low-income immigrants."
Ultimately, this proclamation could lead to a disproportion in socioeconomic class when it comes to who is able to access the U.S.; letting the wealthy in and keeping low-income people out.
The brain behind this terribly anti-immigrant move? Stephen Miller, the White House adviser who was also behind the Muslim travel ban. In layman’s terms, Trump is relying on the same authority he used to issue the travel ban on citizens from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and Somalia, to implement this visa ban regarding health insurance.
What did Trump actually say? The proclamation, which is riddled with anti-immigrant code words, is perhaps best summed up with the following phrase: "Immigrants who enter this country should not further saddle our health care system, and subsequently American taxpayers, with higher costs.” Yikes.
The proclamation alleges that "data show that lawful immigrants are about three times more likely than United States citizens to lack health insurance." As noted in The New York Times, this report, which was published in 2017, comes from the Kaiser Family Foundation, asserts that out of the total nonelderly population, 45% of undocumented immigrants were uninsured, in comparison to 23% of immigrants, and 8% of U.S. citizens.
Ultimately, this proclamation is anti-immigrant. But specifically, anti a certain kind of immigrant: a poor one.
“This new attempt at an immigration ban is as shameless as it is stunning,” Doug Rand, a former Obama White House official and co-founder of Boundless Immigration, told BuzzFeed News in an interview. “It will be chaotic to implement and guaranteed to separate U.S. citizens from their legal immigrant spouses and other close relatives. Was this drafted over lunch today in a desperate effort to change the news cycle?”
As of now, this will go into effect on Nov. 3, however, it’s likely to be challenged.