Mass Illegal Migration Makes Us Sicker, Not Stronger

May 22, 2024

By Brian Lonergan

Since the Biden Administration began taking a blowtorch to our nation’s immigration laws in 2021, beleaguered Americans may have assumed the bad consequences of this shift in policy would be limited to what we can see in the present: border checkpoints overrun with foreign nationals, and airport terminals, police stations, and school gyms turned into makeshift housing for migrants.

But far worse may still be to come as an alarming number of communicable diseases have crossed our borders along with those seeking menial work and generous public benefits.

Despite the best efforts of our partisan corporate media to downplay the problem, the truth has a way of slipping out. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has linked 84 percent of Chicago’s recent measles outbreak to illegal aliens there from Venezuela. The agency’s report cited overcrowding at a particular migrant shelter for the spread, with more than 500 people reportedly packed into a single room.

Even ancient diseases that were long ago all but eradicated in the United States are making a comeback. The CDC published a research letter last year that said the number of cases of leprosy, in the southeastern U.S. may be endemic, and that nearly one-fifth of the cases in the country originate from Florida. In a separate document, the CDC said that among refugees and eligible others who arrived from 2014-2019, 6.1 per 100,000 were diagnosed with leprosy. Given that this data was collected prior to the illegal alien flood that began in 2021, the current number of cases is likely higher.

In addition to measles and leprosy, similar spikes in dread diseases like malaria and tuberculosis have been reported at migrant shelters and in southern border cities.   

The knee-jerk reaction to this data from anti-borders activists is likely to be accusations of “xenophobia” and “otherism” directed at the messengers. But what else could explain how a modern country with diseases largely in check could see such increases, other than that country illegally importing millions of foreign nationals from developing countries with little to no health screenings and no focused vaccination program?

There are very good reasons why America has maintained health protocols for people entering the country legally that should also apply to illegal immigrants. The Immigration and Nationality Act mandates that all immigrants and refugees undergo medical screening exams. However, this applies mostly to those who apply for immigrant or refugee status prior to their arrival in the U.S.

The CDC web site lists the communicable diseases that would cause a migrant to be deemed inadmissible. They include tuberculosis, syphilis, gonorrhea, and leprosy. The agency also states that “Ideally, each new migrant should receive a complete health assessment that includes screening for migration-associated illnesses.”

Even at the high-water marks of immigration flow into America, new arrivals were put through a standard battery of medical tests. Immigrants who came through Ellis Island in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries were required to first stop at a quarantine checkpoint near Staten Island where doctors would look for symptoms of diseases such as smallpox, yellow fever, plague, and cholera. Only after the ship passed inspection were immigration officers allowed to board and begin processing the passengers.

Few, if any, of these procedures have been applied to the deluge of illegal aliens currently entering the United States. Immigration enforcement officers, under orders from the Biden administration, are simply admitting the crush of humanity into the U.S. and dispersing them across the interior of the nation.

At the height of the recent COVID pandemic, the Title 42 emergency order turning away migrants with communicable disease was a useful tool in expelling certain illegal aliens and to neutralize the threat of communicable diseases from entering the country. But by April 2022,  the CDC terminated the policy under direction from the White House, which claimed there was no public health basis to continue removing migrants.

It can be easy to get lost in all the data and not raise the fundamental questions that should be asked. Why does our government prioritize the importation of people with questionable health records over the well-being of U.S. citizens? In addition to the already staggering cost of illegal immigration to this country, how much additional financial burden will we bear to treat this witches’ brew of deadly illnesses that were invited into our country?

“Immigration makes us stronger,” proclaimed then-President Barack Obama in 2013, echoing a phrase that has become gospel among sanctuary politicians and anti-borders activists ever since. When done in a very controlled, strategic manner that takes the effect on the country into consideration, immigration can sometimes be a benefit. Under the current administration’s chaotic, illegal version rife with naked political opportunism, Americans are getting little more than disease, violence, and poverty.  

Brian Lonergan is director of communications at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) in Washington, D.C, and co-host of IRLI’s “No Border, No Country” podcast.

Also published at Chronicles, May 22, 2024.

Photo credit: Jackie Speier, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons