IMMIGRANT, ILLEGAL ALIEN TIDE ENDANGERS PUBLIC HEALTH: For the past several weeks the news from South East Asia has been grim: hundreds of thousands of hapless refugees thrust out of Vietnam and onto the high seas. Appeals to many nations for permanent resettlement of these unfortunates have often fallen on deaf ears, especially in the nations surrounding Vietnam. Reason: most of the refugees are ethnic Chinese, and Chinese already form sensitively significant minority communities in the area.
Much of the resettlement burden therefore has fallen on the United States, which already has swallowed up 250,000 of them. More will be arriving soon at a rate of 14,000 a month.
Public health authorities are now showing great concern over the impact of the refugees on the rest of the population. They are equally concerned also with the threat to public health as a result of the enormous and never ending influx of illegal aliens, mostly from Mexico. Nobody even knows how many illegals (oh, excuse me, "undocumented workers") there are in the United States. Estimates vary wildly from two to twelve million!
The diseases these people bring with them, according to an expert in social work at the University of Southern California, "are all third world kinds of health problems," the sort that the United States wiped out years ago largely through sanitation and public education. But now, according to a lengthy report in the Los Angeles Times (July 23, 1979) the immigrant tide, carrying with it a panoply of communicable diseases "could... move the country back toward 19th-century standards of public health."
Some examples of the scope of the problem, specifically in L.A. County, a major entry area for both refugees and illegals, are as follows:
Tuberculosis is increasing in L.A. County at the very time it has declined elsewhere in the U.S.; Malaria cases in California have been doubling annually for the past three years; Leprosy (not indigenous to L.A. County): 255 cases in 1978 — a ten-fold increase since 1954; and, a near-epidemic outbreak of shigellosis, a dangerous intestinal parasite in the East L.A. barrio. (Given the gastro-intestinal parasite problem, one wonders about the safety of some restaurant meals. The restaurant industry in big cities could hardly exist without illegal workers.)
Public health officials, strained as they are for funds to fight the diseases because of tax cutbacks, are also worried about future outbreaks of measles, polio and other communicable diseases, due largely to the extremely low level of immunization among illegal aliens. The illegals present a veritable disease time-bomb merely because of their sequestered existence: they are loathe to contact public health authorities out of fear of being discovered and shipped back across the border. Their often crowded living conditions foster disease. And being in the country illegally they have avoided mandatory public health screening before entry in the first place.
Thus, it could very well be that one of the main factors contributing to the prophesied disease epidemics to hit the United States will be the immigrant tide swamping America's shores.
ON THE WORLD SCENE
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