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

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

The truth is that the number of dollars we spend on policing the border has skyrocketed during the past 15 years, with little impact on the undocumented population. The reality is that the federal government, at great expense to taxpayers, prosecutes more people for immigration violations than for any other offense -- they now represent more than half of all federal prosecutions.

According to the Washington Post, immigration authorities hold "more inmates a night than Clarion hotels have guests, operates nearly as many vehicles as Greyhound has buses and flies more people each day than do many small U.S. airlines." 

But none of that prevented the conservative media from singing their usual one-note tune about the "unchecked" flow of illegal immigrants, whom they've blamed in the past for everything from spreading leprosy in the U.S. to the rise and fall of the housing bubble.  

In a bit of unintentional irony, the hardliners' knee-jerk response lays bare the claim that they only object to illegal immigrants and welcome with open arms those whose papers are in order. Most people of Mexican descent living in this country are, after all, perfectly legal; the majority -- over 60 percent -- are U.S. citizens, and they, like other Americans, travel back and forth to Mexico and elsewhere.  

As is often the case, it may turn out that this entire narrative is a distraction from real and serious issues at hand. Just as immigration hard-liners rarely if ever acknowledge the relationship between the wave of immigration from Mexico that followed the passage of NAFTA and the tons of cheap, subsidized American corn that flooded Mexico and decimating its agricultural labor market, so too are they ignoring (preliminary) reports that suggest the ultimate cause of the disease outbreak may be industrial hog farms operated by U.S.-based meat giant Smithfield.

According to the Mexican daily La Jornada, Mexican officials said "the vector of this outbreak are the clouds of flies that come out of the hog barns, and the waste lagoons into which the Mexican-U.S. company spews tons of excrement." (The company denies the claim.) 

It would be easy to dismiss these ill-informed rants about immigration as unworthy of analysis because they're shared by a very small (if very loud) minority of the population. But, as in Europe during the Middle Ages, this kind of hate talk can have deadly consequences.  

Claims that Mexican immigrants (legal or otherwise) are disease-carrying pests aren't merely offensive, they constitute "eliminationist rhetoric" -- the idea that a group of people, usually portrayed as less than fully human, are destroying the country from within and need to be excised from the body politic.  

In the four years between 2003 and2007 (the most recent year for which complete data are available), the FBI reported increases in hate crimes against Latinos year after year, and experts say the trend is continuing.

The Savages, Glenn Becks and Malkins of the right-wing media may be clownish, but to the extent that they're helping shape a climate in which all people with an outward appearance similar to that of a migrant from south of the border face discrimination, if not outright peril, their shtick is anything but funny.

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

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.

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