There’s been a persistent and mostly baseless claim in American politics over the last few years that Islamist terrorist have been actively attempting to enter the country through the U.S.-Mexico border. There’s also a long tradition of suggesting that immigrants crossing the border pose a serious public health risk. Ebola was roped into this months before anyone in the U.S. contracted the disease, but the fear mongering has ramped up dramatically more recently.

So, this being campaign season, it was only a matter of time before fears about immigrants, terrorism, and Ebola were combined into one rhetorical supercluster of anxiety.

When asked in a radio interview this week whether he favored travel restrictions on countries in West Africa, Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator now running for Senate in New Hampshire argued that we have a border that’s so porous that anyone can walk across it” and “it’s naive to think that people aren’t going to be walking through here who have those types of diseases and/or other types of intent, criminal or terrorist.”

To be fair, this is a little ambiguous as to whether the people with terrorist intent are the same ones who have the diseases. More explicit was Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania who suggested that U.S. citizens who travel abroad to join jihadist groups, could intentionally infect themselves with Ebola. “Think about the job they could do, the harm they could inflict on the American people by bring this deadly disease into our cities, into schools, into our towns, and into our homes,” he said.

But it took Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina to really bring things full circle by suggesting that closing the border to keep out Ebola-infected Hamas fighters: “Part of their creed would be to bring persons who have Ebola into our country. It would promote their creed. And all this could be avoided by sealing the border, thoroughly. C’mon, this is the 21st century.”

This would all be quite funny if real people weren’t being unfairly stigmatized.

Ebola, first of all, is not a very potentially effective bioweapon. And even if willing recruits were somehow recruited into the Ebola jihad, there are probably easier ways for them to get into the country than by sneaking across the border.

Something also seems fundamentally absurd about a country where Ebola already is present walling itself off out of fear from a country where it isn’t. There haven’t yet been any confirmed Ebola cases in Mexico or anywhere in Latin America. Meanwhile, a Dallas healthcare worker being monitored for signs of the disease boarded a cruise and nearly disembarked in Mexico and Belize this week.

If Ebola does jump the U.S.-Mexico border at some point, I’m not sure why we’re assuming it’s going to be heading north.

Read more of Slate’s coverage of Ebola.