I find that sort of logic personally really disconcerting; the more conservative members of my family use the " they bring disease" logic to oppose immigration themselves. This is especially true of some hypochondriac-inclined aunts of mine who have managed to wed southern provincialism with a kind of paranoid agoraphobia that keeps them wed to O'Reilly on the TV set and afraid to leave their houses because of all that could go wrong if they did (avian flu, crime, SARS, they bought sheets of plastic during the anthrax/terrorism scare, carry bottles of Purell handwash in their purses and go through a bottle a week probably, on the lookout for new health alerts/recalls all the time, etc).
Here in Texas, we used to take vacations in South Padre Island once every few Summers, right off the Mexico border. Beautiful, beautiful place. As the years went by, it did seem like more and more non-white Latinos also vacationed at Padre Island. I personally didn't care because I loved the beach and the party-time vibe of the place. But my relatives decided it was getting too brown and that meant we were more likely to get some disease if we went. Similarly, after Katrina hit they dreaded the refugees coming here to Dallas -- the refugees would also "bring disease and crime" from that swampy city. Stats have since shown that Dallas crime has actually gone DOWN, though we did absorb a significant number of refugees.
One of these aunts also refused to accompany my uncle on a business trip to Paris, France -- on his company's dime! -- because, being a fan of O'Reilly and swallowing all the shit he dishes out about Paris, she got scared into thinking if she went to France she'd be assaulted since "they hate us."
Man, fuck that way of thinking! I can't stand it. There's always a "sensible reason" for people like this to be xenophobic or agorpahobic, no matter what.
-B.
Marta Russell wrote:
"The medical literature reports that many undocumented immigrants sequester within their bodies infectious and fatal diseases that long ago were fought and eliminated by American medicine Now illegals may carry drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, malaria, polio, leprosy, plague, dengue fever and Chagas disease."
Doug wrote:
"Oooh, walking toxin containers they are. Who needs suicide bombers when we have biological warfare delivery systems on legs?"