COVID-19 Variants Do Not Come From Migrants
The Claim
COVID-19 variants come from migrants trying to enter the United States.
News posted on
Emerging story
In the final days of July and continuing for weeks, social media users have been posting the claim across Twitter and Facebook, perhaps in response to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott accusing undocumented immigrants of bringing variants into the country. Some representatives have even posted tweets that directly tie migrants and variant surges.
Misbar’s Analysis
Cases of the Delta variant are rising rapidly in the United States, but it’s incorrect to say that they’re rising as a result of migrants entering the country. According to NBC News, low vaccination rates rather than migrants are the cause of COVID-19 outbreaks and variant spikes.
Officials at the border have recently said that it’s not likely that migrants are causing variant surges. “We can’t attribute the rise in Covid numbers to migrants,” Mayor Javier Villalobos of McAllen, Texas, said, according to the Times.
Additionally, there is no evidence that points to a causal relationship between migrants and case surges. Mississippi, for example, has one of the lowest rates of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Yet, it’s one of the top states for COVID-19 infections, and officials say that’s because it also has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country.
Multiple other news organizations — such as NBC News, CNN, and The New York Times — have debunked this assertion, yet numerous public figures have peddled the false narrative repeatedly. Abbott, for example, has been linking the spread of COVID-19 and its variants to migrants for months. And DeSantis said President Joe Biden himself is to blame because “a wide-open southern border” allows for the virus to travel into the country.
Other Republicans in recent weeks have made similar claims, which are spreading quickly among the American public. About a third of respondents who are not vaccinated indicated in a recent Axios-Ipsos survey that they believe the rise in COVID-19 cases can be attributed to migrants.
