Contagion invasion (Part 1): What ever happened to the principle of protecting our borders against dangerous diseases?

Keeping Americans safe from dangerous diseases was a solemn duty adhered to with the upmost meticulousness since our colonial times. When our federal government began assuming control over immigration, weeding out contagious diseases was the quintessential application of the “few and defined” powers of the federal government against “external” threats that James Madison envisioned as the entire purpose of a federal government in Federalist #45. Has that principle been upended in the era of political correctness?

Even when our medical advances were quite primitive compared to today’s standards, our governments did everything they could to ensure that not a single immigrant could potentially infect Americans with diseases. Now, despite the gap between health standards of modern America and the Third World being greater than ever, has our government given up our defense against contagious diseases so long as they are coming from illegal immigrants? Has our careful vetting system through the legal visa system been completely ignored at our land border?

The Scope of the Problem

One need not be a health care or public policy expert to recognize the clear and present danger of up to one million migrants entering our country in a year from some of the most disease-prone parts of the world – with many of them being released into our communities within hours of arriving. With new outbreaks of once nearly eradicated diseases in our country on a daily basis, the threat is beyond obvious and greater in scope than anything our government dealt with at Ellis Island, given that all immigration over a century ago was orchestrated in a controlled fashion behind quarantined checkpoints.

Most of the migrants today are coming to our southern border from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, but a number of them are coming from other volatile Latin American countries, as well as disease-ridden countries in Africa.

Let’s start with the Northern Triangle countries because that is the source of the majority of migrants. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), “Dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses cause mosquito-borne infections of increasing concern in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.” These are diseases for which there are no vaccinations to prevent. A humanitarian brigade under the U.S. Southern Command was in Honduras this month treating locals for these very diseases.

Scabies, lice, and malaria are other diseases where we have no vaccines for which to defend against, yet the former two have been very common among those surrendering to border agents, while malaria is “endemic” to the area, according to CDC.

Read the rest from Daniel Horowitz HERE.