Elizabeth Lee Vliet — a doctor affiliated with the far-right-fringe Association of American Physicians and Surgeons — plays the filthy-immigrant card (as she loves to do) in a July 21 WorldNetDaily column:
Since 2005, Americans have been warned about microscopic border crossers carried in with refugees and illegal immigrants, bringing diseases previously eradicated or rarely seen here. When not simply ignored by media and health officials, physicians and others sounding the alarm have been attacked as xenophobes.
Now we’re seeing these prescient predictions come true, most prominently in Germany, since 2015 when Angela Merkel began allowing more than 2 million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East to flood into her country.
U.S. and German citizens are put at significant risk by the politically correct acceptance of unscreened immigrants from countries with a high prevalence of infectious diseases, many difficult or impossible to treat. Yet authorities in both countries have failed to fully inform the public of the dangers.
According to the July 2017 Infectious Disease Epidemiology Annual Report by the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, Germany has seen a surge in chicken pox, cholera, dengue fever, tuberculosis, leprosy, measles, malaria, meningococcal diseases, hemorrhagic fevers, hepatitis, HIV/AIDS, paratyphoid, rubella, shigellosis, syphilis, typhus, toxoplasmosis, tularemia, trichinellosis, whooping cough, and many fungal and parasitic infections.
Vliet mentions nothing about vaccinations, which if done to the level recommended by the vast majority of medical experts not affiliated with the AAPS, would provide herd immunity that would protect Americans from many of these diseases. Perhaps that’s because the AAPS opposes mandatory vaccination. Indeed, as we’ve documented, some disease outbreaks in immigrant communities are caused by outsider anti-vaccine activists spreading fear about vaccines.
Perhaps Vliet should address that issue — and confront the AAPS about it — before going on another anti-immigrant tirade. Ah, who are we kidding? She’s totally dedicated to immigrant-bashing to address that issue:
Even healthy immigrants burden the system with social costs, such as housing, education and food stamps – costs borne by taxpaying workers whose own wages are depressed by competition from a glut of low-paid foreigners. Illegal immigrants are estimated to cost U.S. taxpayers $17 billion per year. That $17 billion is in addition to the costs for those allowed here legally under “refugee” status, for which we do not have reliable public estimates.
Liberal and progressive politicians like to say, “America is the land of immigrants.” In the past, this meant legal immigrants who follow our screening procedures for illness and other laws and who are coming to America to be part of our culture.
Medical screening was one of the core purposes of the Ellis Island immigration center in New York. New arrivals were examined, quarantined if needed, or sent back to their country of origin if they posed a risk to Americans.
To protect the health and safety of American citizens, we must reinstate our prior customary medical screening as outlined on our own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website.
For national security and medical concerns, President Trump is correct to enforce our immigration laws, with careful vetting of those seeking to come to America to live and work.
Vliet doesn’t mention that Trump wants to cut the CDC’s budget by 17 percent.