Swine flu and its xenophobic backlash

April 30, 2:49 AMDC Progressive ExaminerAisha Brown

Previous Next

1 comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the DC Progressive Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

It appears that not only swine flu is contagious, apparently so is blatant racism. 

The latest virus to grip our world seems to have re-ignited the immigration debate in the United States.  Since news first broke about swine flu, also referred to by it's scientific name H1N1, conservative talk radio and Fox News began fanning the flames of xenophobia calling for a secure border with Mexico.

On his program Savage Nation, Michael Savage retorts, "Illegal aliens are bringing in a deadly new flue strain. Make no mistake about it." 

Really Mr. Savage?  Maybe he missed the report that the first cases of swine flu were reported when New York City students brought the virus to Cancun, Mexico, during a class trip.  Are they infecting us or are we infecting them?  Hmmmm, perhaps it is the Mexican government should secure its borders from American tourists?

Further exacerbating the situation are erroneous claims by pundits such as Neal Boortz who declared, "What better way to sneak a virus into this country than to give it to Mexicans....then spread a rumor there there are construction jobs here, and there they come."  Mr. Boortz seems to have overlooked reports that Granjas Carroll, the farm experts believe to be the source of recent virus spread in Vera Cruz, Mexico, is a subsidary of the United States agro-business Smithfield Farms.  So it is in fact the exportation of U.S. jobs to Mexico that helped spawn this outbreak.

It appears that this swine flu is really a NAFTA flu.  Professor Robert Wallace declared on Democracy Now that it is the result of neo-liberal policies such as the International Monetary Funds' (IMF) structural adjustment programs (SAPs) of decades past and now free trade agreements, specifically NAFTA, that have laid the foundation for this latest crisis.  Since the livestock revolution of the 1970s, multi-national corporations have exported their swine and poultry farms overseas and capitalized on the cheaper labor and looser environmental and health regulations of developing nations.

The rhetoric about swine flu is just representative of the xenophobic government policies and social views of this nation.  Through the spread of swine flu, what we are really beginning to see is that neo-liberal policies that have oppressed and stalled the growth of the developing world, also hurt us as well.