03/21/2020
VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow wrote this in his hugely successful, and much-hated, book Alien Nation in 1995. I quoted it briefly here in when Dengue Fever ("what? — it’s like yellow fever") was discovered in America in 2010. A number of immigrant-borne diseases have struck American since then, and it’s always considered racist to mention it.
I've updated some links, and slightly improved the footnotes with links. From Chapter 9:
SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION: PUBLIC HEALTH
Whenever large numbers of people are on the move, disease has the opportunity to erupt. Cholera and smallpox returned to the United States with the Irish immigrants of the 1840s.14 Awareness of this danger was one reason immigrants arriving at Ellis Island were so rigorously inspected by efficient batteries of doctors, the myth of "Open Borders" notwithstanding. Of the 24,000 refused admission in 1910, about 15 percent were carriers of contagious disease.15
- With 2 to 3 million illegal entries every year, it is quite possible that the United States has never been so unprotected against immigration’s impact on its public health standards.
News about immigrant-borne disease is also firmly in the unfit-to-print circular file. But here are a few fragments:
- Tuberculosis: once the leading killer in the United States, tuberculosis was virtually extinct by the 1970s. Now it is surging. Partly this is because of new strains resistant to antibiotics, but largely it’s because of immigration from regions like Latin America where the disease is endemic (foreign-born cases accounted for nearly two thirds of the increase in the last decade, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta). In 1991, some 27 percent of U.S. cases were foreign-born; over 60 percent of California’s cases, and 30 to 80 percent of the cases in some immigrant-heavy Washington suburbs.16
- Leprosy: of the six thousand patients in the United States in 1987, 90 percent were refugees or immigrants from Southeast Asia or Mexico.17
- Measles: virtually eliminated in the United States during the 1980s, measles is flaring up — in Hispanic areas, particularly among recent arrivals from Latin America.18
- Cholera, malaria, dengue fever (what? — it’s like yellow fever): all are widespread in Latin America, and all have been reported in the United States recently.19
Quite possibly, disease incubated in the teeming human petri dishes that Third World cities now comprise may be the chance factor that finally crystallizes immigration as a political issue in the United States. For example, the U.S. Institute of Medicine has recently predicted "with some confidence" that if yellow fever, the incurable mosquito-borne disease now resurgent in Africa and Amazonia, returns to New Orleans, public health defenses could be quickly overwhelmed: "100,000 people would become ill … and 10,000 would likely die within 90 days .. ."20
Footnotes:
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.