Michelle Malkin and Michael Savage Use Swine Flu Crisis to Peddle Their Xenophobia

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted April 29, 2009.

In the middle of the 14th century, the plague swept across Europe, leaving death and despair in its wake. A terrified and confused population blamed the Jews -- aliens in their midst -- for bringing the "black death" upon them.

Lacking knowledge of viruses or other microscopic organisms, they accused the Jews, a handy target, of poisoning the wells of Christian villages. The charge contributed to a series of pogroms in which thousands were burned alive.  

During the more than 600 years since, our understanding of disease transmission has advanced by leaps and bounds, but the same primitive tribalism that inspired the lethal xenophobia that raged across Europe then remains on display today.   

With hundreds of cases of swine flu reported in Mexico, and dozens more appearing in the U.S., anti-immigrant hard-liners wasted no time blaming their one-size-fits-all bogeyman for the disease.

They took to the airwaves and scribbled hastily on their blogs about how America's supposed "open-door policy" towards migrants from Mexico was the cause of the outbreak's appearance on this side of the Rio Grande. 

According to transcripts provided by the watchdog group Media Matters, blogger and former Fox News personality Michelle Malkin took a triumphal attitude over the handful of cases that have popped up in the U.S., writing: "I've blogged for years about the spread of contagious diseases from around the world into the U.S. as a result of uncontrolled immigration."  

Hate-radio host Michael Savage also advanced the argument, saying, "Make no mistake about it: Illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico."

Savage then took it a step further, weaving the swine flu outbreak into a larger conspiracy that included another of his favorite monsters. "[C]ould this be a terrorist attack through Mexico?" he asked. "Could our dear friends in the radical Islamic countries have concocted this virus and planted it in Mexico knowing that you, [Homeland Security chief] Janet Napolitano, would do nothing to stop the flow of human traffic from Mexico?" If only he could have sewn together a plot by gay radical Islamic illegal immigrants from Mexico, he would have hit the far-right trifecta. 

Neal Boortz, Bill O'Reilly and others on the right agreed. Boortz asked, "[W]hat better way to sneak a virus into this country than give it to Mexicans? Right? I mean, 1 out of every 10 people born in Mexico is already living up here, and the rest are trying to get here. So you give -- you give -- you let this virus just spread in Mexico, where they don't have a CDC." 

These arguments -- if this kind of demagoguery can even be classified as such -- are easily dispatched. The flu virus is transmitted between humans, and the tiny organisms don‘t care whether those humans are Mexican immigrants or American tourists or truck drivers or corporate honchos traveling for business.

Every day, hundreds of thousands of humans and other animals cross the U.S.-Mexican border, and most are not picking up and moving, they're just visiting for work or pleasure. It's a product of a shrinking world with affordable means of travel -- suspected cases of the flu have popped up as far away from our southern border as New Zealand and Israel, places you don't associate with a lot of immigration from Latin America.  

Media Mattters noted, "several media reports on U.S. swine flu patients indicated that they had recently traveled to Mexico." A spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control told reporters, "I know that we have confirmation of disease in people who have traveled to Mexico … that is definitely the case in some of our cases, and that's an important factor to consider."  

The "open door" mantra is itself a right-wing myth -- a bit of pseudopopulism designed to piggy-back on the frustration most Americans feel over the abject failure of the same enforcement-heavy approach to immigration control that restrictionists prefer to make a major dent in the undocumented population.

See more stories tagged with: xenophobia, mexico, swine flu

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.

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