When my grandfather entered the U.S. in 1903 from Bialystock, Poland when his parents were killed, he was first detained at Ellis Island and screened by the Public Health Service for “loathsome or dangerous contagious diseases.” If he had been found to have tuberculosis, venereal disease, trachoma, or favus, he would not have been allowed in. More than 75 years later, when my wife came here from Moscow in 1989, she also underwent rigorous public health screenings.
Currently, several diseases make a foreign national inadmissible to the U.S. for health reasons. These diseases include leprosy, active tuberculosis, cholera, plague, five separate sexually transmitted diseases, and influenza caused by strains with the potential to cause a pandemic. Foreign nationals who are not vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, and several other diseases are also not allowed legal entry.
Since illegal immigrants who enter the U.S. are not prescreened in any way, many carry disease. The Rio Grande Valley Sector of the Border Patrol has detained 150,000 illegal immigrants so far in just this year alone. Eighty thousand children are expected to cross the southern border illegally in 2014. The Border Patrol and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have set up temporary holding centers in southern Texas and Arizona, where conditions are cramped and unsanitary. Ten to 25% of the immigrants in that area are suffering from scabies, a highly contagious intensely itchy rash caused by insect mites.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/06/30/immigration-crisis-us-experiencing-major-public-health-crisis-too/
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