Because the vast majority of immigrants, legal and illegal, now come from rural areas, towns, and cities of the most impoverished nations of the hemisphere, where sanitation is often poor and health care nonexistent, they impose other costs upon the American people.
High among these is the appearance among us of diseases that never before afflicted us and the sudden reappearances of contagious diseases that researchers and doctors eradicated long ago. Malaria, polio, hepatitis, tuberculosis, and such rarities of the Third World as dengue, fever, Chagas' disease, and leprosy are surfacing here. In the states that border Mexico, writers NewsMax.com columnist George Putnam, there is "a steady, silent, pervasive invasion of the United States by an unarmed army carrying an assembly line of diseases into the heart of America."
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, writes author-columnist Phyllis Schlafly, "reported 38,291 Californian cases of tuberculosis that included Multiple Drug Resistant Tuberculosis, which is 60 percent fatal and for which treatment costs $200,000 to $1,200,000 per patient. Illegal aliens are also bringing in syphilis and gonorrhea. Bedbugs have invaded the United States for the first time in 50 years, with 28 states reporting recent infestations."
In May 2006, the New York Times reported that one in every seven East Asian immigrants in the city, as many as 1000,000 people, is a carrier of hepatitis B--an infection rate thirty-five times that of the general population. ALmost all the new measles cases in America are brought in from abroad.
John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute cites a report by the Center for Immigration Studies entitled "Immigration's Silent Invasion, Deadly Consequences." "The invasion of illegal aliens pouring over borders of the United States in taking an ominous turn. They are not alone! Their bodies may carry Hepatitis A, B, & C, tuberculosis, leprosy and Chagas Disease. Chagas is a nasty parasitic bug common in Latin America where 18 million people are infected and 50,000 deaths occur annually."
For forty years, only 900 cases of leprosy or Hansen's disease had been diagnosed in the United States; in the first three years of the twenty-first century, 7,000 cases were discovered. Some of the TB diagnosed in now the multi-drug resistant strain. In 2002, northern Virginia reported a 17 percent surge in tuberculosis cases; in Prince William County, the increase was a staggering 188 percent. In northern Virginia, foreign-born accounted for 92 percent of all cases. Three countries all of which send immigrants and illegal aliens to Ameirca, account for two-thirds of all TB cases: Mexico, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
The New York Academy of Sciences reports that "TB bacteria readily fly through the air, as when an afflicted person coughs. It's estimated that each victim will infect 10, 20, or more people--in time bomb effect" Whitehead ends his "Deadly Invasion" commentary with a question: "What does this mean for America?' He answers:
"It means your children are at risk when attending school or going to the movies. It means that when a classmate from a foreign country sneezes or coughs, your child may be at risk for any number of diseases. If you eat at a fast food restaurant, a person infected with hepatitis could prepare your food. If you need a blood transfusion, the blood could be infected with Chagas Disease."
The incidence of TB is ten times as high among immigrants as among our native-born. Among immigrant children it is 100 times as high. The famous phrase from the 1980s report about our failing public schools, A Nation at Risk, has taken on an ominous new meaning.
