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PASTOR'S REPORT July 23, 1979
Page 7
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 ille
gally 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.
--Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau