The largely unsubstantiated concern that the Central American migrant children are carrying infectious diseases is fast becoming a trope among Republican lawmakers. It was given an airing on the O’Reilly show last night. “The fact that this rumor is circulating at all,” Jesse Singal comments, “can still tell us some interesting things about the way human beings are wired to view outsiders”:
Erin Buckels, a researcher at the University of Manitoba who has studied this issue, explained in in an email that both her work and a great deal of prior research has “demonstrated a strong and automatic tendency to dehumanize outgroup members, even when we have no prior experience with those groups.” Notions of pollution and infection loom large here: We often “view outsiders with disgust — partly due to the risks of infectious disease that outsiders carried in our evolutionary past — and this causes a conservative shift in our thoughts and attitudes.” So unfamiliar people “are seen as closer to animals than humans, and therefore pose a danger to our bodies (and even our souls).”
This is basically a universal human impulse — every time you read a horrific story about a young couple being murdered for a relationship that stretches across sectarian or class or caste lines, that’s part of what’s going on. In certain contexts, people just can’t stand the notion of being “infected” by outsiders — and infection can mean anything from “them” crossing “our” border to members of an undesirable class having sexual relationships with “our” daughters — to the point where they will kill people to prevent that infection from occurring.
But Samuel Kleiner is blunter, calling the claim another example of America’s long, ugly tradition of “public health nativism”:
Doctors have debunked claims of diseased-ridden children: The migrants tend to be middle class with updated vaccines. By engaging in this right-wing fear-mongering, the aforementioned elected officials—and many others—are earning their ignominious place in a long, ugly history in American nativism that demonizes immigrants under the guise of public-health concerns.
With each wave of immigration, nativists have made public-health excuses for keeping out migrants. In the 1830s, cholera was described as an “Irish disease,” and in the late 1800s Tuberculosis was portrayed as a “Jewish disease.” In 1891, Congress banned any immigrant “suffering from a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease.” Even at Ellis Island, a site we celebrate as America’s front door for the “tired and weary,” medical inspections were a weapon aimed at immigrants who traveled on second and third class and were commonly used to quarantine and turn back unwanted immigrants.
And then as recently as 1993, the HIV ban was instigated to prevent gays and Haitians from entering the country. It took almost twenty years to repeal and replace it.
(Photo: An anti-immigration activist stands next to a Pinar County Sheriff’s deputy during a protest along Mt. Lemmon Road in Oracle, Arizona in anticipation of buses carrying illegal immigrants on July 15, 2014. About 300 protesters lined the road waiting for a busload of illegal immigrants who are to be housed at a facility in Oracle. By Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images.)
The Dish 