Shame, shame shame on the pustulent immigrant-haters such as columnist Michelle Malkin, radio talk show host Brian Savage, and the others who have begun calling Mexicans “pigs,” and even worse things, using the outbreak of “swine flu” as an excuse to spread their racist hatred.
The truth is out – despite their frequent denials, these fomenters of social division are outright racists. Their issue is not really illegal immigration, it is the very existence of people they don’t consider “American.”
If anything, the spread of the H1N1 virus shows us that we are all brethren. The disease puts the lie to the words of the haters in America, those ignorant, vicious, declarations exposed as the rantings of people who forgot that America is, was and will always be a home for the many different peoples of this planet.
Disease knows nothing or race or nationality, nothing of borders. The H1N1 virus, as the World Health Organization now prefers to name this latest influenza threat, is a human affliction. It spreads from person to person, and has made its way around the world in the bodies of travelers rather than as an insidious attack brought by illegals. It was relatively rich white people who were first discovered in the U.S. to be infected, and the sad death of a Mexican baby while brought on a visit, legally, with his parents to Texas is certainly not a consequence of any illegal migration.
What a smear on the very spirit of the United States that yet again immigrants in the land are the target of such malignity. Even after 200 years’ effort at learning to welcome and embrace people who build up our country and enrich its life, the inheritance of the Know-Nothings of the early 1800’s continues to itself infect some Americans with the worst of all diseases – hatred.
J. Lange Winckler is a maritime historian in Tampa, Florida.
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