COVID-19 Shows the Dangers of Internal Borders Going up within Countries

The "Go to Travel" campaign was supposed to symbolize the return of Japanese tourism. In an industry that has been battered by a 99.9% decline in the number of foreign tourists, the government-initiated campaign promised to save restaurant and hotel operators around the country by subsidizing domestic tourists to make up for the shortfall. Yet, just a few days before the campaign was due to start, the government announced that trip to and from Tokyo, the epicenter of COVID transmissions in Japan, will be excluded as a target for subsidies, leading to a surge of cancelations of hotel and tour bookings.

The sudden exclusion of Tokyo from the campaign is both damaging in the short- and long-term. The wider Tokyo metropolitan area is home to close to 30% of the country's population and nearly half of its GDP, making Tokyoites, unquestionably, the most numerous and wealthiest residents of the country. To discourage them from traveling, as their exclusion from the Go to Travel campaign essentially did, will severely limit the economic benefits that would come from the campaign. Indeed, news about the surge of cancellations has attracted anger from the tourism industry that is saddled with sunk costs and conflicts over the collection of cancellation fees.

But perhaps more damaging is the sheer arbitrary nature of the exclusion, simply based on where a person lives. Given that Tokyo is by far the most populous prefecture in Japan, the larger number of people testing positive for coronavirus is unsurprising. If anything, in a country with nearly uniform policies about COVID handling, Tokyo, with its superior healthcare facilities, should be one of the better-equipped regions to handle an increase in cases that may come from greater interregional movements of tourists. But instead, the exclusion of Tokyo only encourage people from other parts of the country to irrationally see all Tokyo residents as risky.

Indeed, one can even argue that the exclusion of the entirety of Tokyo prefecture from the campaign is not granular enough to prevent further spread of the virus. Beyond the neon lights of downtown Tokyo, the prefecture also encompasses large swaths of rural areas in its mountainous west and tropical islands to the south. These sparsely populated areas have previously had few infections, but are now threatened, as more Tokyoites, seeking to travel despite discouragement to leave Tokyo, seek out the remotest corners of their prefecture. The risk they pose to rural Tokyo is no different from other prefectures receiving Tokyo visitors.

The result may be a greater prevalence of less-affected parts of the nation stigmatizing people for areas that have higher infection rates. The selective closing of the international border to stop people moving from countries with more cases may soon be playing out within individual countries that have large discrepancies in caseloads among different administrative areas. This will be particularly notable in the second and third waves of infections, where infections may be less nationally distributed (as in the initial wave) but emerge in smaller, geographically concentrated clusters.

The putting up of internal borders, and the resulting prejudice against people from the more affected parts of the country, have seen plenty of precedent during the COVID crisis already. China's decision to close the borders of Hubei province, the original epicenter, from the rest of the country led to the stigma against Hubei people around the country. Individual EU member states restored some border checks, despite EU's venerated free-travel principle, bringing back old nationalist tendencies. In the US and Australia, stark differences in infection rates among different states have also led to the shutting down of interstate travel.

As internal borders go up within countries, the trend of globalization accelerated by the COVID-19 epidemic may spread to fuel "de-nationalization." With the breakup of global supply chains and trade, large economies with large, wealthy domestic markets will fare much better than smaller, poorer countries. Similarly, as countries erect internal borders, large, wealthy cities like Tokyo will fare much better than rural areas without many economic activities other than agriculture and tourism, both of which rely on the income from the wealthier urban areas. The result is an increased wealth gap within countries resembling the gap across countries.

The fight against COVID-19 has brought out the tribal instincts among all governments. The closing of national borders threatens to entrench economic inequalities and prejudices across different countries around the world, based on the simple metric of whether they handled the COVID crisis well or not. Now, as countries deal with isolated cases of COVID within their borders, they threaten to do the same within national borders. As governments seek to restrict movements of people from some regions more than others, they must be mindful of the harm such policies will do the unity of the citizenry as one people without distinction of regional affiliations.