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Immigrants are not to blame for global epidemics: insights from past and present

Yet, one crucial but overlooked point dismantles these fears about immigrants being active vectors: while human mobility transforms regional human-to-human transmission into global outbreaks, immigrants and refugees are relatively static compared to seasonal travelers. Unlike tourists and business travelers, who travel back and forth across borders on a temporary but regular basis, immigrants and refugees have settled in their adopted countries fairly permanently. Their often-limited resources prohibit frequent travel. In contrast, cruise ships sailing for weeks despite having infected people on board helped carry the coronavirus around the globe, contributing to the mounting toll of cases and deaths. And the return of hundreds of thousands of Canadian snowbirds to Canada after wintering in Florida, a COVID-19 epicenter, raised fears among health officials about an increase of infected cases in the country.

Right-wing advocates use pandemics and other disruptions to the international order (like terror attacks) as evidence of the dangers of immigration

Despite being a far less mobile population, immigrants never seem to be able to leave behind the mantle of “foreigner.” Right-wing advocates, based on little but poorly-disguised racism, use pandemics and other disruptions to the international order (like terror attacks) as evidence of the dangers of immigration. Their narratives disregard that immigrants overwhelmingly make up a country’s essential workforce. Such fear-mongering escalates xenophobia already percolating in society. Popular media and political discourse link immigrants to dangers unfolding in faraway lands, highlighting the “foreign-ness” of immigrants and their descendants. Immigrants consequently become depicted as internal threats. This holds true even when immigrants are not from or have never visited the places where the threats originate (I expound on this subject in my book Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World).

Many segments of the American public blamed Latinos for Zika, and African immigrants for Ebola, regardless of which South American or African countries the immigrants came from. Today, the COVID-19 crisis, having originated in China, is feeding into pre-existing anti-Chinese racism. This is despite the fact that the virus that led to the outbreak in New York, which has the largest U.S. death toll, came from Europe. Hate-crimes against those perceived as Chinese has similarly risen in Canada.

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" » Immigrants are not to blame for global epidemics: insights from past and present." Tahseen Shams | Radio Free - Monday June 8, 2020, https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/08/immigrants-are-not-to-blame-for-global-epidemics-insights-from-past-and-present/
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» Immigrants are not to blame for global epidemics: insights from past and present | Tahseen Shams | Radio Free | https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/08/immigrants-are-not-to-blame-for-global-epidemics-insights-from-past-and-present/ |

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