[T]he simplest explanation for Trump's decision to halt some legal immigration to the U.S. is that it aligns with his long-held ideological beliefs, and the electoral strategies and policy choices that spring out of those. Since well before the coronavirus outbreak, Trump has practiced an identity politics where he often uses people of color and immigrants as foils. Since well before the coronavirus, one of Trump's core policy ideas was limiting immigration however possible. And Trump has campaigned on being tough on immigration since he entered the Republican presidential primary in 2015.

In this light, it's pretty easy to explain Trump's new policy. One likely rationale is simply that Trump is an immigration hawk who has long wanted to essentially "shut down the border," and the virus gave him the pretext for taking one of his more aggressive anti-immigration moves as president. In fact, this new policy might have a limited impact because the administration had already dramatically curtailed immigration since the outbreak of COVID-19.

A second explanation is electoral. Trump is up for reelection in November, and he and his team probably think that the president's anti-immigration stances help him at the ballot box. After all, it's hard to imagine Trump being in the White House without his promises to build a wall on the U.S-Mexico border and ban Muslims from entering the U.S. -- Trump's anti-immigration approach was likely a major factor in his winning the GOP primary in 2016.

Those anti-immigration stances may not actually help Trump in the general election this November -- even if he thinks they will. Polls suggest Americans overall don't hold strongly anti-immigration views. And it's not clear that Trump's immigration stances were particularly helpful electorally to him or Republicans in general in the 2016 general election and the 2018 midterms. In the final weeks before the midterms, for example, Trump talked about immigration nonstop and his party lost badly, including key races in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- all states where Trump won in 2016.

More fundamentally, this new immigration ban fits with Trump's approach to both governing and electoral politics, which relies on a kind of identity politics that casts certain groups, particularly people who are white and Christians, as allies, and casts others, often those who are non-white, as enemies