Disease is the Achilles' Heel of the open-borders crowd. Contrary to their apparent imagining, there was rigorous official screening of immigrants back in the Ellis Island era: 1-3 percent of them were turned back every year. With 1-3 million illegal border crossings every year, nothing like these safeguards exist now. This may be the unreported story of West Nile Disease. It is certainly the unreported story of America's much touted but unhistorical "commitment" to refugees.
Same story (but worse, of course) in Canada
Someone is coughing in the subway, nearby. You can see a half dozen public service ads extolling "safe sex," but underground neither morality nor prudence can protect from the germs of your fellow passengers. In a cab with a coughing driver, you can open the window wide, though it's December, calculating the risk-reward ration of flu versus…tuberculosis.
TB is back. Ten years ago, on the heels of the AIDS epidemic, it was rising fast, but effective countermeasures—including directly observed therapy and even detention of patients stalled the disease's rise. But now the drugs are weaker, the strains more difficult-sometimes impossible-to cure. And rates are rising.
Where is the disease coming from? Our immigration policy, that is courtesy of Bill Clinton, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, La Raza, George W. Bush and dozens other culprits. Listen to Dr. Lee Reichman of the Center for Disease Control.
"We're now at the level that to control TB anywhere we have to control it everywhere. We're doing a great job with native-born Americans. We're not doing a good job in keeping down the incidence among persons coming into the country."
A CDC report notes that immigrants are six times more likely to have TB than Americans, and their rates are rising. VDARE notes that in all of Dr. Reichman's nuanced exposition of the difficulties in diagnosing and treating this long dread disease, he mentions not once the possibility of actually reducing the number of TB carriers who enter the country.
December 17, 2000
