Late yesterday President Trump proclaimed a new ban on entry to the US or issuance of new US visas to citizens of twelve countries, and ordered drastic restrictions on entry or issuance of visas to citizens of seven others.

The US has long sought to globalize its surveillance and control of travelers.

In the past, the US has held out the carrot of possible admission to the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP) to induce governments of favored countries to share information about their citizens with the US. Citizens of countries in the VWP are eligible to enter the US for limited stays and purposes with a simpler, cheaper ESTA rather than a full US visa.

Now the US is using the stick of a travel ban to induce governments of disfavored countries similarly to cooperate, under duress, with US demands that they serve as foreign agents of the US government in identifying, tracking, and collecting and sharing information about their citizens. The countries subject to this new form of transactional, sanctions-based “diplomacy” are those which are unlikely ever be admitted to the VWP.

This latest US travel ban isn’t exclusively limited to countries with mostly-Muslim populations like the series of travel bans proclaimed by  President Trump during his first administration, but was immediately denounced as “transparently racist”.

In addition to its direct effects on the right to travel, freedom of association, and the rights of asylum seekers, the new travel ban appears to be intended as a tool to pressure foreign governments to collaborate with the US in surveillance of their citizens, thereby weaponizing US travel controls to expand extraterritorial US surveillance outsourced to foreign governments.

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