Well I am just shocked, shocked to see that the wingnuts are using swine flu to bash immigrants. As I predicted over the weekend as soon as I heard that there was a swine flu issue in Mexico, the usual suspects who believe that anyone from south of the border is inherently inferior, criminal, disease-ridden and just plain subhuman are using this issue to try again to rally Americans to hate their neighbors, whether they live next door or across an artificial line.

This is a sadly familiar story to those of us who study California history. As recounted in Nayan Shah’s excellent book Contagious Divides, a 1905 plague epidemic in San Francisco was blamed on the city’s Chinese residents, and became an occasion to physically quarantine the entire neighborhood. Serious proposals to expel the entire Chinese population were considered, and for about four decades afterward every Chinese person who came to the US was quarantined on Angel Island, in bleak and often unsanitary conditions.

Hell, even during the Black Death in the 1300s Europe was full of conspiracy theories blaming Jews for the plague, a meme that unfortunately persevered well into the 20th century, coming to a head in Hitler’s Germany.

As usual, immigrant bashing is done by right-wing populists unwilling to admit that their ideology of subservience to wealth and power is actually what’s behind the problem. In this case factory farms appear to have played a significant role in causing and spreading the epidemic. That’s not a problem unique to Mexico – anyone who’s read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation knows that similar conditions exist right here in the good ol’ US of A.

There are other aspects of this issue that suggest the assumed superiority of American over Mexican is utterly baseless. While waiting in the San José Airport this morning I caught a report on a Texas town’s concerns over swine flu. One man who came down with the flu – and who quickly recovered – said “well I think we just have a better health care system here than they do down there.”

As many who have studied American pandemic preparedness are all too aware, of course, this is bollocks – our health care system is in tatters and would be totally unable to handle a serious flu epidemic. There too, the wingnuts blame immigrants, but the truth is that the system fails the native-born just as often, and for the same reason – because profit has been emphasized over safety and health. God forbid we actually focus on that!

That conservatives would be so quick to repeat these sordid lies should surprise no one, but it should outrage everyone.

Updates: Wanker of the day: Eric Massa, for suggesting without credible evidence that the US/Mexico border should be closed based on the swine flu. There’s no evidence that the people crossing the borders are disease vectors, and in the absence of a credible threat there’s no reason to seal the borders.

It doesn’t help when the media breathlessly turns this into a huge “omg we’re all gonna DIE” issue. On CNN just now they had a reporter at the San Ysidro border crossing (the world’s busiest) who noted that the border was still open and that border officials were being instructed to look for flu cases but nothing more. To her this was concerning, to me it’s one of the most sensible things the border officials have ever done.

I also have a version of this up at Daily Kos.