2/19/21

By Josh Rubin

We don’t have to reach very deep into our xenophobic souls to find an assumption that is resilient and persistent: the belief that the threat of contagious disease comes from foreigners, a greater threat, for instance, than the risk you might run at a basketball game at an American high school gym. This unfounded belief is based on no evidence at all that disease, like Covid, is any more prevalent in the migrant population than it is at an an all-American Thanksgiving dinner. It is simply not so.

There are consequences to this stubborn belief. Those that ought to, and probably do, know better are making policy that places migrant populations in danger, all to kowtow to these fossilized xenophobic premises. Here is one consequence: people who are waiting in the cold and in the fierce danger of violence and other crime in border cities like Matamoros will have to remain, dependent on tests for Covid administered by overwhelmed Mexican agencies before being allowed to cross the border and join a population that likely has a far higher prevalence of the disease than do the people who would finally make their way across that bridge.

Another, even more consequential: our government is relying on this hateful belief in diseased foreigners to keep its borders shut to migrants, instantly expelling hundreds of thousands of people in a state of crisis. All the while, millions engaged in normal commerce crisscross the border, free of any screening at all, their involvement in the miracle of trade and money overwhelming any of the fear reserved for their poor brethren.

It is based on a CDC order, strong armed by the Trump administration, now in place under Biden, using a tool to stigmatize whole peoples that would not embarrass the Nazis.

But it should shame us.