Published on Thursday, December 06, 2018 by Common Dreams

New Lancet Study Shows Right-Wing Attacks on Refugees and Migrants Based on 'White Nationalist Propaganda'—Not Facts

"Migrants commonly contribute more to the economy than they cost, and how we shape their health and well-being today will impact our societies for generations to come."

by Julia Conley, staff writer

A new study published Thursday in The Lancet, one of the world's preeminent medical journals, makes clear the increasingly familiar attacks used by right-wingers worldwide to dehumanize migrants and refugees by describing them as disease-infested is a xenophobic slur rooted in racism and hate, not facts or the science of public health.

The two-year analysis by two dozen experts at universities including Johns Hopkins and Columbia found that international migrants are less likely than people born in their new countries to die of conditions including heart disease, cancer, respiratory illnesses, and others.

The notion that immigrants like the small group of asylum-seekers who traveled from Central American countries to the U.S.-Mexico border recently are unhealthy and will bring disease into the U.S. "is a false argument that is used to keep migrants out," one of the study's authors, Dr. Paul Spiegel of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins, told NBC News.

@BarbaraBoxer
If you are willing to let facts lead your thinking (instead of the other way around), consider that science tells us that migrants don't, in fact, bring disease.

Link to tweet

The report, published in the Lancet on Wednesday, follows a number of xenophobic, fear-mongering segments on Fox News in which media personalities—after spending weeks claiming that the group of refugees was made up of criminals—resorted to a new tactic, dubbing the group a "caravan of diseases"—provoking outrage but not surprise on social media.

-snip-