Do you have a link to this? All I see is the Fox reporter saying "Before Joe Biden was president, he said that Covid travel restrictions on foreign countries were hysterical, xenophobia and fear-mongering." Do you have a source for this?
There's a link to the Washington Post timeline in the original tweet I posted.
....When Biden was running for office he said the border closure policy was xenophobic hysteria.
The linked WaPo article does not conclude that Biden's comments about Trump's xenophobia were specifically aimed at the border closure policy. Yes, they occurred later in the same day, but considering that democrats had been calling Trump xenophobic and fear-mongering for years, there doesn't seem to be enough evidence to tie this particular comment to Trump's policy announced that day.
But I go back to what I asked earlier, what is it that you really want to know? Are you asking why this tweet seems to conflict with his current policy? If yes, why is it that important to you to deconstruct this or any other Biden tweet? Granted, Trump's communication was mostly via tweet, and we needed to pick apart those sound bites to understand if he was formulating a new policy, hiring and firing, or covfefe-ing. But twitter is not the major means by which the rest of us communicate. Presidential candidates, like many of us, have made one-sentence comments 18 months ago that we're happy to let stay in the past.
Or do you want to know what Biden thought of border closings in the past, and if and why those have changed? Because if that's your question, then there's a more useful place to find the answer.
The USA has protocols and plans in place for all types of disasters, including pandemics. This was one of the things that Trump was criticized for at the start, that he had gutted the team responsible for putting such plans in place.
You referred to the White House Pandemic Playbook which was created during the Obama-Biden administration, so those 69 pages should give a more detailed explanation of his views than the analysis of a one-sentence tweet. It aims to facilitate decision-making by providing a series of questions to ask and appropriate government agencies to consult.
P. 44 has a section on Travel-related interventions. Possible interventions include:
Working with affected countries to place restrictions on travelers exiting the impacted countries
Working with transit countries to place restrictions on travelers coming to the US from an affected country
Providing health-related guidance to travelers entering the US
Restricting the arrival of conveyances or individuals from affected countries
There's more, but I think it's clear that the travel restrictions were not something that Biden had been opposed to in the past.