The northern triangle of Central America is one of the most violent and impoverished regions in the world and is the prime hub for human and drug trafficking. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that bringing in hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from these countries within a few years will bring in crime, gangs, and drugs. Indeed, that is what has happened since 2014. But what is being overlooked by many, particularly those on the Left, is the strong likelihood that by not blocking illegal immigration, we are importing devastating diseases that we’ve worked hard and long to eradicate from our country.

This is how regressive progressives are. They turn back a century of indispensable health care progress and sacrifice it on the altar of political correctness.

Over the past century, Americans have successfully diminished and, in some cases, nearly eradicated certain infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, pertussis, rubella, malaria, hepatitis, polio, measles, and mumps. Over time, every American has been checked and inoculated (except for the few who refuse), and all the legal immigrants are screened for these diseases. This has been done since our first immigration laws and was a value as deeply embedded into the tissue of our immigration politics as any other issue.

But what happens when hundreds of thousands are enticed to come here illegally thanks to the endless incentives? And what happens when they are coming from the most impoverished areas that are a century behind us in medical progress in terms of combating infectious diseases? Well, while we’ve made enormous strides in improving public health as a nation, we are not keeping up with our policies on immigration from even one century ago. In fact, we are going backwards.

Here is why it’s inconceivable that the recent resurgence of many diseases we thought were on their way to extinction is not in large part due to illegal immigration. We know that the countries dominating these caravans – Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras – have high rates of infectious diseases. We know that it’s not the wealthy and well-to-do citizens who are migrating here. And here’s what else we know. As I reported earlier, while we’ve apprehended hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens every year, there are hundreds of thousands of others who come in undetected without any health screening.

For argument’s sake, let’s just assume that all those who are apprehended and then released into our country are inoculated and screened before being released, pursuant to the Centers for Disease Control’s protocol. What about those we never see but are able to get in because the Border Patrol is busy dealing with the ones we are amnestying? While the data is purposely being suppressed, no logical person can deny that there’s a serious public health concern with these migrant caravans and the thousands of others who come in undocumented as a result of the border officials being overwhelmed.

In general, this is a part of even the legal immigration discussion that our political class wants to ignore. As I’ve said repeatedly, immigration from the third world is fine when it’s done responsibly and gradually, but when it’s done in such large numbers so quickly and dominates our system, we will begin to bring in all its vices. Thus, along with poverty, we will bring in diseases.

As professor of economics at George Mason University Walter Williams observed in a September column, “Data reported to the National Tuberculosis Surveillance System show the TB incidence among foreign-born people in the United States (15.1 cases per 100,000) is approximately 13 times the incidence among U.S.-born people (1.2 cases per 100,000).” Moreover, Williams cites a 2002 CDC study that shows countries that have recently taken in a number of third world immigrants are seeing a relatively high prevalence of tuberculosis among the newcomers. “Today, the proportion of immigrants among persons reported as having TB exceeds 50 percent in several European countries, including Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. A similar proportion has been predicted for the United States.”

But let’s put the debate over numbers and origin of legal immigration on the shelf for a moment. Why can’t we all agree that incentivizing illegal immigrants from countries with a high prevalence of these infectious diseases is a colossal public health risk? Illegal immigrants are less educated than their legal counterparts and are even more prone to carry these diseases, in addition to never being detected, screened, and inoculated. Whereas TB prevalence among legal immigrants in America is 15.1 cases per 100,000, which is high enough, the prevalence of TB among Guatemalans is 106 per 100,000 people, according to the CDC. In other words, Guatemalans are 83 times more likely to have TB than Americans and 7 times more likely than legal immigrants.

The Centers for Disease Control, in its 2017 report, further found that dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses are either prevalent in or endemic to the three Central American countries. They also found that malaria is “endemic” to these countries, but bizarrely concluded that the “prevalence is not high enough to justify routine screening or presumptive treatment.” They further found that these countries are at “high risk for neglected tropical diseases,” with over one million children being treated each year for soil-transmitted helminths in Guatemala and Honduras. Central America experiences at least 200,000 cases of Chagas a year, a disease that is “the most common cause of nonischemic heart disease in Central America and may cause cardiomyopathy years after initial infection.”

In addition, there are numerous other diseases for which they have no data, but it’s very likely they are endemic to the impoverished population in this part of the world.

It’s also important to remember that as bad as the health care is in these countries, “access to basic healthcare in Central America largely depends on socioeconomic status,” according to the CDC. On average, it is the most impoverished population coming here, given that we know they are coming for economic reasons, not primarily because of violence (which would, in theory, drive out the more wealthy population as well).

Obviously, we have our own problem with a small minority of people who don’t want to get vaccinated, but ultimately these new outbreaks, such as the recent measles outbreak, are originating from other countries. Certainly, even if we didn’t have illegal immigration, there’s always a risk of bringing in diseases from the cross-border travel of Americans. However, there is no denying that the 800-pound gorilla in the room is the fact that millions of illegals have come over the border this generation from very risk-prone countries without ever being screened in detention facilities because they were never apprehended. It’s simply unacceptable that our government refuses to study this issue further and consider this as a major factor when deciding policies that incentivize caravans and other invasions.

Have we become so political as a nation that political correctness will allow us to revert to the 18th-century health standards? Ironically, the Left is obsessed with creating a monopoly for the insurance cartel under the guise of promoting health care, but they seem to never care about the actual “care” part. This is why the government and the media have stifled any data on this issue and we never hear any concern about the resurgence in diseases very plausibly emanating from this gaping hole in our public health defense. One journal article from the Infectious Disease Society of America in 2009 agonized over the “ethnical concerns” that the “publication of the results would lead to increased stigmatization and discrimination of undocumented persons in the United States and to harsher measures, such as deportation, when these persons receive a diagnosis of TB.”

From our earliest colonial laws, through state regulations and our first federal immigration laws, our politicians always sought to protect this country from diseases brought in through immigration. Courts in the 1800s even ruled that states didn’t violate the foreign commerce clause by regulating the flow of ships in order to prevent those with diseases from landing on their shores (New York v. Milne, 1837).

Indeed, by creating new “rights” at the expense of the social compact right of Americans to sovereignty, we are neither more enlightened, advanced or more progressive than our forefathers. In fact, our robust knowledge about diseases and our deft ability to prevent them make our utter disregard for the public health concerns of open borders all the more regressive and benighted. (For more from the author of “Illegal Immigration Isn’t Just a Security Issue — It’s a Public Health Crisis in the Making” please click HERE)

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“Republicans believe in the rule of law, not the rule of the mob.”

This comment from President Trump at a weekend rally in Kansas should be the rallying cry not only for this election but for a policy agenda every day after the election.

A recent bust of a criminal alien drug trafficking network in Lawrence, Massachusetts, an obdurate sanctuary city, should demonstrate once and for all that the border invasion and sanctuary cities are the main cause of the opioid crisis. In a sane world, it would serve as the impetus for Trump to promise a veto of the next budget bill, in early December, that doesn’t defund sanctuary cities. Heck, a sane party would bring Congress back from its endless recess to spark another Kavanaugh-level fight over sanctuary cities, sovereignty, drugs, gangs, and the rule of law. Not a bad formula to win back suburban voters.

Illegal aliens and sanctuaries are separating Americans from their families in the grave

New England has been hit hard by the drug crisis. The entirety of the post-2013 increase in fatalities has come from illicit street drugs. Where do they come from? Last week’s joint ICE/DEA bust of a criminal alien network in Lawrence, Massachusetts, involving over 200 law enforcement officers, provides us with a lot of insight. ICE detained or issued indictments for 50 illegal or criminal aliens who were operating in plain sight of authorities in and around Lawrence and charged them with gun, drug, and immigration violations. Several of them were also identified as sex offenders. They had enough fentanyl to kill half the population of the Bay State. That’s an awful lot of people who would be permanently separated from their families in the grave thanks to the singular focus in both parties on coddling “families” who cross the border and bring in drugs. Included in the bust were individuals whom local authorities failed to detain and hand over to ICE after prior arrests.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies and a resident of Massachusetts, told me that she is not surprised by this bust. “The city of Lawrence has given them safe haven with its egregious sanctuary policies,” said Vaughan, who is in touch regularly with local law enforcement. “State and local officials in Massachusetts, right up to the governor, have been in public denial about the role of deportable criminal aliens in this festering problem and failed to take action that would make business difficult for the traffickers – they even allow them to obtain driver’s licenses and welfare benefits.”

This front page of the Boston Herald last Saturday is worth 1,000 words:

Saturday's page 1 pic.twitter.com/AgLyLUcM0e

— Joe Dwinell (@joedwinell) October 6, 2018

This in a nutshell is how sanctuary cities are fueling the drug crisis. It’s one thing to come to this country illegally and get across the border undetected. But it’s much harder to remain undetected in perpetuity and successfully operate a profitable drug network. That is, unless you operate in a sanctuary city, where they do everything possible to avoid detaining illegal aliens caught on drug charges. If local authorities were properly fighting the drug crisis, upon catching the first street distributor, it would lead them to the broader network. But that would involve arresting and turning over illegal aliens to ICE.

Earlier this year, Nick Rogers, a detective for the Denver police, explained to the House Judiciary Committee how effective interior enforcement disrupts drug networks in short order:

They were mostly young, 18 to 25-year-old, illegal aliens from mostly Mexico, but as the years went by, some started coming from Honduras and Nicaragua. They were all in possession of several ounces of heroin and a fake ID from Mexico (Sinaloa was most common). Some of these arrests led to what was known as “the office”: A location, usually a higher-end apartment, which was used only to stash the heroin and money. Many of these “offices” produced tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars in cash waiting to be sent back to Mexico. Each office also produced an average of one pound of heroin located there.

None of this has been taking place in Lawrence. Look at this list of indictments from the U.S. attorney’s office and you will see that this is entirely an immigrant problem. Many of the suspects already had interactions with police but were never turned over to ICE for deportation. Many of those involved in the drug ring hailed from the illegal alien hot-spot countries of Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic. The largest and most deadly component of the drug crisis is all an immigration problem and is completely redressable through punishment and deterrent of sanctuary cities.

The drug crisis is all an immigration problem, not a health care problem

As I’ve warned over and over again, the feds and state governments have misdiagnosed the drug crisis as a prescription problem in order to protect sanctuaries and illicit drugs peddled by Mexican and Dominican drug cartels. In New Hampshire alone, prescription opioids dropped by 33 percent from 2013 through 2017, at the exact time that illicit drug overdoses spiked. This is why just 14 percent of those who sought treatment for addiction in New Hampshire last year did so for prescription opiate addiction.

Likewise, Massachusetts has one of the lowest prescribing rates in the nation, yet is one of the top overdose states. This is no mystery, because almost all of those who overdosed this year had fentanyl and other illicit drugs in their systems.

This has nothing to do with health care and has everything to do with immigration and national security. The Boston Globe, in 2017, admitted that “Mexican cartels are delivering vast quantities of the inexpensive and powerful synthetic drug fentanyl to New England” through “a pipeline that often begins in China, winds through Mexico, and flows into distribution cities such as Lawrence and Springfield.”

This is also why cocaine and meth, which are not even opioids, are the most trending drugs in overdose increases. All of these drugs come from drug cartels. Just last week, a DACA recipient was arrested for trafficking meth.

This is why Trump called out Lawrence’s leaders for their role in drugging up both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, which are served by the network of the drug cartels in this sanctuary city. The media made fun of Trump’s assertion as if it were some conspiracy theory, yet all this fentanyl that is now laced into the heroin and other drugs is being distributed under the eyes of Lawrence’s leadership.

Absent this effort by the feds, this network would have never been apprehended. This sentiment was echoed in a statement by Todd Michael Lyons, acting field director of the Boston ICE office:

This subgroup of criminal illegal aliens has effectively embedded themselves in the community and have hidden in plain sight for too long with impunity. If state and local leaders along with elected officials want to combat the opioid problem in the Commonwealth, they need to be serious about rooting out the foreign nexus of the problem. ERO is dedicated to removing the foreign criminal element that is directly contributing to the overwhelming number of overdoses in this state and others. No sanctuary should be given to a criminal alien who has actively taken part in hurting the youth of New England.

Congress can and must act and can actually win the election on this issue

While the efforts by the Trump administration are laudable, we still need Republicans in Congress to run on this issue and then actually fulfill their campaign promises. As Jessica Vaughan warns:

As helpful and necessary as these operations are, we still need Congress to do its job and provide the resources for better border security, update our laws so gang members and drug traffickers can be thrown out more easily, and impose some consequences for sanctuaries. House Republicans have written bills to do all of this, and the president would sign it in a New York minute, but a few powerful individuals who are more interested in passing expanded guest worker programs keep getting in the way.

Congress can end this tomorrow by finally placing these priorities in the budget bill. I detailed 25 ideas to fight back on criminal aliens, including ending the identity theft mill through the SSA and the IRS, which allows these networks to operate. Moreover, as Vaughan notes, it’s hard for even law-abiding districts to apprehend and turn over illegal aliens because the lower courts are creating new rights every day for MS-13 and drug cartels. The Ninth Circuit just made it impossible to detain many suspected criminal aliens.

Imagine if congressional Republicans engaged in a Kavanaugh-level fight over the rule of law vs. the mob law of sanctuaries, drugs, and gangs – all issues that concern suburban voters. Then we might actually be talking about a red wave. And imagine if they actually fulfilled the promise immediately after the election. We can only dream. (For more from the author of “If You Really Want ‘the Rule of Law,’ Get Rid of Sanctuary Cities and Their Illegal Drugs” please click HERE)

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