My article from the July 23, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:
Obama’s Illegal Aliens: Importing Deadly Third World Diseases
By Matthew Vadum
Even as exotic new diseases and nearly-eradicated old ones keep popping up across the nation, the Obama administration is unconcerned, or some would say, recklessly indifferent, to the public health threat that Third World illegal aliens pose to the American public.
This isn’t an observation from would-be GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump or some wild-eyed rube — it’s a devastating criticism that comes from two public health experts at the government’s own Centers for Disease Control (CDC). It comes as deadly diseases surface or make a comeback in the U.S. Among those ailments are tuberculosis, pneumonia, paralysis-causing acute flaccid myelitis, dengue fever, swine flu, and enterovirus D68.
The two patriotic U.S. government employees, CDC Logistics Management Specialist George Roark and CDC Public Health Advisor William Adams were revealed to have complained in a series of emails June 9 last year about Obama rolling out a very long red carpet for people who have no right to be here and no desire to obey America’s laws. This was around the time the Obama administration was trying to cover up the concentration camp-like facilities in which it was detaining Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs).
Their comments were contained in an email exchange obtained by good-government group Judicial Watch in which the two officials rightly trashed President Obama for allowing a flood of sick young illegals into the United States.
In the email exchange between Roark and Adams, Adams wrote that “no country in the world would allow” Obama’s massive influx of unwanted foreigners.
Adams answers that “in ten years or less, they’ll all be voting … Commander’s intent … ”
Shooting from the hip, Roark characterizes Obama as “the worst pres[ident] we have ever had … he truly is ‘the amateur’ but a Marxist too.”
It is fair to say that federal immigration policy is now driven by a desire to import new Democratic voters, an unsavory scheme in which, strangely enough, the GOP’s suicidal congressional leadership is complicit. Lackluster border security, risible efforts at immigration law enforcement, mass amnesties, promises of generous taxpayer-financed welfare benefits, and other goodies, are used by President Obama to expand and remake the American electorate. It is gratifying to see that these two federal employees get it.
Although President Ronald Reagan wisely said, “a nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation,” the very idea of national borders is under relentless assault today. The open-borders movement sees no reason for borders. Some left-wingers and libertarians say having borders is exclusionary; a look at the dictionary shows that they’re correct in saying that borders exclude people but they are missing the point. Patriotic Americans recognize that having the ability to exclude individuals from the country is not only a good thing, but something that is absolutely essential to national survival. Support for border enforcement has nothing to do with hatred of immigrants. Ellis Island, where unhealthy foreigners used to be temporarily quarantined, wasn’t established by the U.S. government because Americans despised immigrants. It was set up to protect the domestic population from deadly imported diseases. The government was fulfilling its proper role by protecting Americans.
Contrary to what left-wingers say, it is not nutty or racist to be concerned about foreigners importing diseases; population movement is how diseases spread. Aliens and even some citizens may unwittingly bring in pathogens for which Americans have not developed immunity. Sometimes these maladies cause death on an epic scale. Centuries ago Europeans brought pathogens like the smallpox virus on their persons to the new world. Indigenous Indian communities were wiped out because they had never encountered it before.
Egyptian merchants spread smallpox thousands of years ago to the Indian subcontinent and from there it spread around the world. In the late 18th century it killed about 400,000 Europeans annually and was responsible for one third of all cases of blindness. It that century it claimed the lives of five reigning monarchs in Europe including King Louis XV of France (1774). The Black Death (the Yersinia pestis bacterium) killed up to 200 million Europeans in the mid-1300s. It is thought to have found its way from Asia to Europe via the Silk Road trade route. The catastrophic 1918 flu pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza virus reached even remote communities in the Arctic and it must have been spread to that region by humans.
Meanwhile, Obama and his allies know that spineless Republicans will tuck tail and sprint for the exits as soon as left-wingers start playing by Saul Alinsky’s rules by hurling bad words and epithets at them. Failing to genuflect to the Left’s dogmatic, wholly unscientific assertion that illegal aliens couldn’t possibly be bringing serious health problems with them is the quickest way to get smeared as racist, nativist, paranoid, xenophobic, and downright kooky.
Quite apart from the crushing burden that sick illegal aliens place on the U.S. healthcare system, federal lawmakers are worried about the health-related dangers of the mostly Mexican ongoing invasion.
“I don’t think there is any health care professional who has examined the fact, who can honestly say that Americans have not died because of the diseases brought into America by illegal aliens who are not properly healthcare-screened as lawful immigrants are,” Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), said on the Matt Murphy radio show earlier this year.
Former Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) wrote a letter last year to the head of the CDC stating that the multitudes of minors entering the country illegally carry with them deadly diseases put the American public and Border Patrol agents in jeopardy. Among those maladies are dengue fever, swine flu, and possibly Ebola virus and tuberculosis, said Gingrey, a medical doctor who specializes in obstetrics.
Most of the aliens, categorized as UACs, hail from Central America and some of them undoubtedly bring infectious Third World diseases that have become rare in the U.S. He wrote:
As the unaccompanied children continue to be transported to shelters around the country on commercial airlines and other forms of transportation, I have serious concerns that the diseases carried by these children may begin to spread too rapidly to control. In fact, as you undoubtedly know, some of these diseases have no known cure.
Evidence seems to bear out what Brooks and Gingrey are saying. Below are some of the facts that the notoriously tight-lipped Obama administration has been unable to suppress.
The Daily Mail (UK) reported a fortnight ago that over the last year upwards of 100 children in 34 U.S. states have been afflicted with a mysterious paralysis called acute flaccid myelitis. A suddenly paralyzed 6-year-old tested positive for enterovirus C105, a newly-discovered virus that is related to polio. It is possible these two ailments entered the U.S. piggybacking on immigrants, illegal or otherwise.
Pneumonia and swine flu broke out last year at a housing facility for almost 600 young illegal aliens at Naval Base Ventura County, outside Los Angeles.
Multi-drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, an ancient disease considered to have been more or less eradicated in the United States, have been reported in populous California, Florida, Texas, and New York, all of which have large concentrations of illegal aliens.
On its website, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), a branch of the increasingly useless Department of Homeland Security, acknowledges how dangerous TB is, offering a brief refresher course in the deadly malady that used to be called the White Plague:
Tuberculosis (TB) … bacteria usually attack the lungs. But TB bacteria can attack any part of the body, such as the kidney, spine, and brain. If not treated properly, TB disease can be fatal. … TB is spread through the air from one person to another. The bacteria are put into the air when a person with active TB disease of the lungs or throat coughs, sneezes, speaks, or sings. People nearby may breathe in these bacteria and become infected. … In the early 1900s, TB disease killed one out of every seven people living in the United States and Europe. …TB continues to be a problem. For example, while the number of TB cases is still declining, the speed of decline has slowed since 2003. Multidrug-resistant TB (MDR TB) remains a concern, and extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR TB) has become an important issue. Finally, racial and ethnic minority populations and foreign-born individuals continue to account for a large number of TB cases in the United States. This is why the initial screening for TB and the appropriate treatment of TB for individuals coming to the United States and living here permanently is an important tool to help eradicate the disease in the United States and worldwide.
Lawful immigrants are screened for tuberculosis but obviously illegal aliens who do not come into contact with authorities are not.
It should be noted that some illegals in the U.S. are a threat to the well-being of Americans even if they are in perfect health. As the widely respected, nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies reports, a segment of the illegal alien population works in the organized crime sector. A recently released Center fact sheet states:
Immigrant and transnational gangs represent a unique public safety threat to American communities, due to their unusually violent nature and their involvement in cross-border crimes such as drug and weapons trafficking, human smuggling, extortion and kidnapping. Immigration enforcement has played a key role in disrupting and dismantling certain gangs that have non-citizen, and especially illegal alien, members. [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] arrest data shows that such gangs are not confined to traditional immigrant gateway communities, but have sprouted all over the country, in urban, suburban and rural areas. Since 2005, ICE and its local law enforcement partners have arrested more than 30,000 gang members, leaders and associates. Violent gang members arrive from all over the globe, but ICE arrest data reflect that the most prolifically violent gangs that are the highest priority for enforcement have significant numbers of members from Central America and Mexico.
No one knows for sure how many illegal aliens are present in the U.S. but the most quoted figure and the one accepted by the government is in excess of 11 million people.
The actual number is probably higher, according to Zack Taylor, chairman of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers Inc. “The more likely figure is 18 to 20 million and rising daily,” Taylor said.
All of these illegals are people who should not be here to begin with. These uninvited guests in our country unlawfully jumped the official queue, passing over millions of potentially qualified prospective immigrants around the world who in some cases have been waiting for years.
Any contagion these illegal aliens bring with them adds insult to injury. Any case of a communicable disease brought to the U.S. by someone sneaking into the country is one too many.