"The Case for Open Borders": Disease

Travelers wearing face masks. Image source.

Here's another quote from the book "The Case for Open Borders". This part is talking about the idea that we can't have open borders because there's a risk of immigrants bringing disease into the country. From pages 135-136:

One form of nonhuman migration that's an obvious concern is disease. Certain dangers do undeniably exist, as evidenced by Europeans bringing smallpox to the Americas, or Rome spreading malaria to the outer regions of its empire. But migrants today are less threatening pathogenic vectors than are trade or international business. 

Take the US-Mexico border. About 350 million people cross it every year, the vast majority of them local residents going about their daily lives: businesspersons, as well as tourists and the curious, all browsing la frontera. The number of migrants who cross the US-Mexico border varies by year, but it's typically less than one million. For the majority of the COVID-19 pandemic, standard cross-border traffic was not shut down along the US-Mexico border, but migrants and asylum seekers were barred from crossing, even when infection rates plummeted. Scientifically, the discriminatory cordon sanitaire made zero sense. To keep a disease behind a border would require a shutdown of the entire capitalist system, not just attempts to stop asylum seekers.

Yeah, when people talk about how we need to restrict immigration because of the risk of disease, they're not talking about rich people's business trips and vacations. They're talking about undocumented people. Even though in sheer numbers, the rich people with business trips and vacations have a much bigger effect.