A quick search shows ~20% of immigrants being deported testing positive (up to 25%). There are something like 200K immigrants currently encountered by border patrol per month. Naively that's 50K people coming to the US each month with covid who are poor (probably can't self quarantine), live in dense, multi generational households and exist outside of the law. Realistically, we'd expect that ICE (deportation) contributes to the spread. At any rate, I don't see how illegal immigration could be qualified other than a significant vector in the spread of covid.

Facts don't support this hypothesis.

We couldn't find a lot of places more far away from Mexico frontier in the entire US that NY. It was the first place seriously hit. It was hit for months while the Mexican border was showing... nothing. Do you have a logical explanation for that?

People being detained for months in really crowded places, as can be seen in all videos taken... they had covid when were deported? Well.. This is hardly a surprise to me.

> Do you have a logical explanation for that?

We are talking about one vector over the last few months. The state of NY over a year ago is a non sequitur. Illegal immigration has probably increased close to 3x since then. Besides which, my understanding of the high mortality in NY is that it was mainly due to Cuomo emptying out hospitals of covid patients and sending them to nursing homes.

kind of like saying a river is making the ocean wet. . .

Shouldn't you think about a control group? Legal immigrants? Law enforcement gatherings? Prisoners? Local area positivity rate?

Maybe if their rate of infection were significantly lower than the local population, you could argue that we would be decreasing the percentage of the infected population which doesn't feel particularly compelling to me... but we'd really need to know how much each group contributes to the spread. My expectations is that illegal immigrants make larger contributions than average given their density in living arrangements, lack of access to health care, inability to take sick days, etc.

I think we are only in the business of arguing the counterfactual of what percentage of them get covid from interactions with law enforcement vs otherwise.

I'm not blaming the southern border, I am pointing out a fact that has implications on how we manage our expectations, and what actions to mitigate the corona virus that will work better than others given our situation. if you think facts should be suppressed then you hardly believe in science. its sad that russdpale thinks this comment should be removed by moderators. I also didn't state this is the only reason, nor that the solution should be stopping the border crossings.

In fact, I am arguing for increased capacity to handle the corona virus long term. short term measures like trying to lock down borders is going to have little meaning in the long run, and hurt a lot of people.

Those types of contents are becoming more and more common on this forum. Doesn't seem like mods care.

The problem is mosaic and pretending one of the myriad factors is marker of a hatemongerer is itself hatemongering.

> racist and Republican

Are both of those insults?