Media Matters doesn't understand epidemiology, statistics, immigration
Media Matters for America is taking Bill O'Reilly to task for agreeing with a caller that the health and financial impacts of massive illegal immigration might equal or surpass the effects of 9/11.
On the site, Media Matters - which admits it receives money from George Soros - prints a supposed transcript from the Bill O'Reilly show.
Notably, O'Reilly says "I think you could probably make an absolutely airtight case that more than 3,000 Americans have been either killed or injured, based upon the 11 million illegals who are here."
And, I'd imagine that you could easily make that case, considering the numbers of crimes committed by illegal aliens, together with the health impacts of illegal aliens.
As we know, many liberals and other corrupt supporters of illegal immigration frequently use the strawman argument that today's immigration is the same as that of yesteryear. That is false for many reasons, and one of those is that most of those prior immigrants came through Ellis Island. Of those, some were found to have communicable diseases and they were sent home. (Only a small percent were sent home because the steamship companies did their own pre-screening. The steamship companies were fined for those who had to be sent back.) [SEE UPDATE]
Today, of course, millions of people have snuck over our borders without having been inspected for disease. And, many or most of those come from countries where diseases that have been eradicated in the U.S. are still common.
I posted the following links in comments there. Feel free to sign up for an account over at MMFA and educate them some more:
Illegal Immigration and Public Health
Leprosy in America: new cause for concern (Over 100 cases were found in immigrants last year, more than double the number in 2000, and, while the number of cases is still comparatively small, some researchers believe the trend could lead to leprosy spreading to the U.S.-born population.)
"Illegal Aliens and American Medicine"
UPDATE: The History Channel link above no longer works, but an archived copy is here:
web.archive.org/web/20040229010527/http://www.historychannel.com/
exhibits/ellisisle/reborn2.html
The page appears to have been authored by Pete Hamill of the NY Daily News. It says:
The steamship companies were required to pay for the return passage if an immigrant was rejected, a rule designed to force the companies to examine immigrants before they boarded.
The page also references The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society 1880-1921 by Alan M. Kraut.
Comments
eh (not verified)
Mon, 04/25/2005 - 00:20
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"...might equal or surpass the effects of 9/11."
There has been no question in my mind for some time now that immigration, legal and illegal, will more surely destroy the America we know and grew up in than millions of terrorists in Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else for that matter ever could.
With the invasion of Iraq the basic fact that it's the ones we let into the country who caused the problem seems to have gotten lost.
John S Bolton (not verified)
Sat, 04/23/2005 - 21:12
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The above linked article mentioned how underdiagnosed leprosy is; but they did not speak of the more common kind of leprosy, which does not cause disfigurement. That less virulent kind of leprosy could have spread very widely without being noticed. Would our public health system investigate for the incidence of this, and thus protect the public health; or would their first concern be avoiding the 'scapegoating' of immigrants? There are some similarities in symptoms between the less virulent, but more common, form of leprosy, and those associated with autism to some extent. It is again requested that this possible linkage between rising autism incidence, and mycobacterium leprae, be investigated. One method would be to compare immigration from the countries with the highest leprosy incidences, or the largest number of cases, with other census data by jurisdiction, for the correlations between the two.
John S Bolton (not verified)
Sat, 04/23/2005 - 20:57
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If you take Soros' money, and you are a piper, his openness value fiction will be the tune. It will be that way even to the extent of blinding oneself to the fact that openness to leprosy is not something that people can reasonably call valuable. A century of progress against an infectious disease can be lost in a few years, so that some ordinary politicians can have a way of trying to prove that they're not racist, and some more leftist ones can stir the pot of racial and ethnic conflicts, for the aggrandizement of power that is to be won that way.