Why we can be confident that the surge in coronavirus cases isn't the fault of immigrants

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Philip Bump
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One last end-of-day push: a detailed look at why the right-wing narrative that migrants are spurring the new surge in coronavirus cases is obviously not true.

Analysis | Why we can be confident that the surge in coronavirus cases isn’t the fault of immigrants
It's politically convenient to blame migrants for the coronavirus surge in the United States, but it's not defensible.
washingtonpost.com
1:37 PM · Aug 6, 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/06/why-we-can-be-confident-that-surge-coronavirus-cases-isnt-fault-immigrants/

“I’m going to argue, you know, the high rate of covid positivity at that border — any American that is infected because Joe’s not enforcing the laws of this country, you can blame Joe Biden for covid,” Hannity said, claiming vaguely that migrants crossing the border are driving the current surge in coronavirus cases. “And if you die, I would put the blame on him, too. Why won’t they stop this superspreader event? Because it’s happening in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands.”

“Sean,” Cruz replied, “you’re exactly right.”

Sean was not exactly right. He was not even partially right. Nor was Cruz right when he started riffing on a Fox News report about 7,000 migrants in the city of McAllen, Tex., being released while coronavirus-positive.

“McAllen is a city, its population is about 140,000,” Cruz said. “That means 5 percent of the population of the city consists now of illegal immigrants who tested positive for covid that Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris are just dumping there, one after the other after the other because they won’t enforce the law.”

Before I explain why, it’s worth considering why Hannity and Cruz are making the claim. There’s a long history of scapegoating immigrants as vectors for disease. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump’s insistent demand for a wall on the border often centered on the untrue claim that migrants posed a “tremendous medical problem,” as he put it in 2018, because of diseases they purportedly carried.

*snip*