Virus Brings Swine-Hearted Lobby Into Foreground

Virus Brings Swine-Hearted Lobby Into Foreground
by: nezua
Tue Apr 28, 2009 at 15:20:14 PM EDT
By The Sanctuary Founding Editors:

The moment that the news of the "Swine Flu" or "North American Influenza" hit the wires, it was easy to predict what the anti-immigrant faction would have to say about it. People like Michael Savage, Neil Boortz, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan, and groups like CIS, FAIR, and NumbersUSA are so locked into their views that their voices are unnecessary in a dialogue that actually preferences truth-which by nature requires flexibility and bravery. The stances of those who most vocally oppose immigration today are so predictable that one could paint a face on a septic-tainted soccer ball and paste up word balloons and rest well, knowing that The Nativist Lobby point of view on any immigration-related topic will end in "deport them all" and "seal the borders" if not "round them up" and other tired ideas. And nobody reading now needs a reminder of how throughout time, both Latin America as well as all immigrants have been slurred and painted with the brush of disease by those resistant to changing demographics.

This reaction is nothing new. Xenophobic fearmongering has long masqueraded itself behind public health alarmism.

Fear of contagion was used to justify Chinese Exclusion laws in the 19th century, backed up by pseudo-academic papers such as "Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of the Nation" (1862) and "How the Chinese Women Are Infusing a Poison in the Anglo-Saxon Blood" (1875). The Angel Island detention facility was set up specifically to quarantine immigrants from Asia, sometimes for months or even years, while European immigrants were processed at Ellis Island in a matter of hours. It is an especially cruel irony of history that it was the Europeans who were bringing to "the New World" the deadly diseases which would claim millions of indigenous lives.

There are of course legitimate public health concerns which deserve attention and precautions; but what's noteworthy is the manner in which these concerns are discussed and imagined, what's played up and played down, what's said and unsaid, and how a racial line is drawn between the clean and the unclean.

Moreover, when the border is lined with barbed wire as it is now, it actually keeps undocumented migrants in- this is another ever-repeating mistake made throughout history, including with Italians after 1924. Before that time, they were much more likely to return home because they knew they could come back if necessary. We have repeated this again with the US Southern borders, which has interrupted the age-old migratory patterns that have brought workers in and out of the US, depending on the seasonal need for more hands. Ironically, this has forced many undocumented to put down roots here. And then the predictable complaints arise from the Nativist Lobby-that we are being "invaded" and "overrun."

How sad for them. These people are unable to simply admit that they are seized with a mental illness that has frozen their mind into a shape echoed throughout time. It is a crooked, and ugly one.

This flu will pass. Meanwhile, people are dying and suffering in México and in the US. Is hatred and fear all these well-paid pundits have to dispense in trying times? Do they see themselves as embodying something...American? We at The Sanctuary have to wonder if people like Michael Savage might best be described as terrorists cells awakening. After all, they are shouting that we should not trust our government, not trust our Health Departments, not frequent businesses that employ brown people, and they incite violence. Would not such disruption of society and our collective emotional fabric, in fact, be terrorists' goals for us?

Let us be united, then. United against fear and hateful misinformation. Together we can keep our heads, our hearts, and our health-while the crazed voices of Yesterday and the zombie-like Nativist choruses of today twist around one other in the rotted mire of irrelevance.