Old-time xenophobia, COVID edition
We talked on FAQ NYC with guest host Katie Honan abour Cuomo’s long goodbye.
And, shifting governors, I wrote a column for the Daily News about America’s long tradition of immigrant-blaming that Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott are latching on to now to try and pass the buck for the virus surge on their watches.
Old-time xenophobia, COVID edition: Again, blaming the disease-carrying foreigners - New York Daily News
The myth that irresponsible and infectious immigrants are bringing a plague to our shores is nearly as old as America itself. For the better part of two centuries, it has been used again and again to try and cut off every incoming wave of huddled masses.
The germ of the nativists’ virulent idea has proven remarkably resilient, whether the “threat” comes from the Irish, the Mexicans, the Haitians or the Central Americans: These unsanitary, ignorant and wretched refuse would sicken and kill Americans if we suicidally allowed them to come here and breathe free. The danger is simply too great to wait for proof of the premise, or to consider the lasting dangers to our liberties posed by emergency measures.
Long before Trump’s “Kung flu,” cholera was “the Irish disease,” and tuberculosis “the Jewish disease” or “the tailor’s disease.” After an autopsy suggested an immigrant had died from the bubonic plague in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the entire neighborhood was quarantined amid calls to burn it down, while physicians dispatched by the Board of Health forcibly jabbed Asians on the streets with a plague vaccine that was still being tested. Germans were blamed for spreading polio as the Great War raged in Europe, and sauerkraut was renamed “Liberty Cabbage” and hamburger “Liberty Steak.”
In most of these cases, the scapegoated group had a similar rate of infection as the broader population, though you’d never have known that reading newspaper coverage or listening to politicians debate what needed to be done.
That history appears to be repeating itself as the delta variant of COVID-19 spreads wildly and needlessly in states where an outsized share of Republicans suspicious of the administrative state and “Democrat” power seem determined to live “free” by rejecting vaccines and masks. Sadly and predictably, infection, hospitalization and death rates are swelling again in this utterly needless public health crisis in Florida and Texas where GOP governors haven’t merely disregarded CDC guidance on masking but have taken the deeply unconservative and irresponsible step of barring local officials from imposing their own masking requirements.
Sadly and predictably, Govs. Greg Abbott of Texas (where he’s asked hospitals to put off all elective surgeries as the medical system is on the verge of being overwhelmed by new patients including a disturbingly large share of younger and previously healthy ones) and Ron DeSantis of Florida are cynically trying to divert attention from their reckless decisions by suggesting that the real problem is the Central Americans arriving in great numbers this year in the hopes of receiving a more welcoming reception from the Biden administration.
The White House is giving a “free pass into the United States of people with a high probability of COVID, and then spreading that COVID in our communities” says Abbott. “Whatever variants are around the world, they’re coming across that southern border” thanks to Biden, says DeSantis.
It’s a particularly dumb and dishonest charge from the governor of Florida, a state that, you know, isn’t on the southern border but nonetheless has by far America’s worst outbreak at the moment even as he’s fundraising off of the idea that “Joe Biden has the nerve to tell me to get out of the way on COVID while he lets COVID-infected migrants pour over our southern border by the hundreds of thousands” and peddles “Don’t Fauci my Florida” merch ahead of his reelection bid next year and a hoped-for presidential run in 2024.
Tellingly, neither governor has provided any numbers so far to back up the idea that the immigrants are responsible for the surges in their states. While there are no national numbers, local health officials in border states (and from both parties) have provided various statistics showing low rates of infection for both the virus and the delta variation, and no stats yet to the contrary.
Naturally, both governors have taken to the safe space of Fox News to push their wild claims without being asked to show any receipts to back them up. That’s the same network that helped Trump bang a drum about how fake American President Barack Obama was letting Ebola arrive from Africa in 2014, and then about how Central Americans were going to bring smallpox and leprosy here in 2018. Both those bogus “storylines’’ predictably petered out following the mid-term elections, once their electoral value was gone.
Maybe one reason that the fear of new arrivals has remained so potent here is whatever vague memories people have from their school days about the “Columbian exchange” when Europeans first arrived in the “new world” and brought smallpox, measles, whooping cough, chickenpox, bubonic plague, typhus and malaria with them before returning to Europe to introduce syphilis there.
With no resistance to those newly introduced diseases, historians estimate that 80 to 95% of the Native American population was wiped out in the century and a half that followed Christopher Columbus’ arrival.
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