You know what’s truly a wonder? Your staunch unwillingness/inability to address what I actually posted.
Heck, I crossed into Vermont on Saturday for the afternoon. I got lectured for not having my passport, but I got in anyway. No turning my head and coughing or anything.
Bolded parts are outright false or require faith in the authority of the speaker, which none of us should have for these folks. Bracketed parts are what I think the article is trying to imply, and which is false:
Whoopsy! My mistake-the title says “border”, not “borders”. I guess the topic isn’t our paler cousins to the North.
I will admit that there might be good reason to close our borders, though-to stop our spreading preventable diseases to other countries that don’t have rabid anti-vax groups…like the one magellan01 uses as the source for this thread’s topic.
I am giving it exactly the attention it deserves.
WHen has any nation ever had borders that are 100% secure? The East Germans, with the Berlin Wall, the exclusion zone, and terrain far more hospitable to guards/fences/surveillance than the desert southwest, couldn’t do it; North Korea can’t either (the Chinese authorities have regular drives to remove North Koreans who slipped across the border illegally).
The history of border control along the US/Mexico frontier is mostly “block 'em here, so they move over there”; as enforcement steps up in any one sector, illegals move to a different location or a different mode of travel, in a never-ending game of catch-up.
Your question that “shouldn’t we take the steps necessary” presupposes that there ARE steps that could provide absolute security, and I disagree with that basic premise.
Sure it does. It provides something you say you want, but it does it for a reason that actually makes sense- a reason that doesn’t discredited rantings by immigration opponents.
Once you take out the bit about open borders - which XT didn’t actually say he wanted - your response to XT didn’t actually respond to XT all that much. Here’s what I think this comes down to: yes, it makes sense to check people’s health when they come into the country. But not because we’re not facing a plague brought over the border by illegal immigrants (we are not). If you want a system that results in quality checkups, you need new border policies- including an immigration system that isn’t so penal, because people will have to want to get checked out. If people are afraid of being caught by the authorities, they’re going to try to duck the system.
No. I can’t agree. It is pretty clear that the AAPS is full of ideologues and it is not clear where they are getting their data. I have surfed around on the CDC site for a while and am having a hard time determining how much of a threat immigrants actually are. Looking at the CDC data and this report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service, it looks like the CDC is more worried about influenza coming from Asia than stuff coming from Mexico.
Can you perhaps post some data that would make a reasonable person believe there is a concern instead of just the rambling of some apparent ideologues and an appeal to authority? For great debates and for advocating a policy that cuts us off internationally in this age of globalization, I would expect you to have a source with some science behind it.
No, its not.
Same goes for Gaza. Israel has walled off the entire area and there’s a million checkpoints at what few gates the wall has. Boats can’t get away with anything, either.
Result ? Tunnels. Tunnels everywhere. BTW, Magellan, have you ever watched *Weeds *by any chance ? 
Wouldn’t this be true of travellers to and from countries with poorer-than-the-US health situations? Should you be instituting health screenings and mandatory vaccination documentation for all legal border crossings/flights, including for American citizens?
Yes and no.
Lock down the borders, but make it easier to come in legally for health checks, etc.
Well, maybe if we vaccinated our OWN people more reliably this wouldn’t be such a concern. Also, as noted, plenty of other countries have BETTER vaccination rates than the US because of public health systems open to all (not just the middle-class on up) and fewer exceptions to vaccination due to nutball reasons.
If TB was THAT contagious we’d all have it. There is plenty of TB here in the US. I worked at a clinic for four years with plenty of patients with TB and all sorts of icky things, never caught any of it (we were tested regularly). Only one person on staff ever turned up with positive antibodies and she took her course of medication as directed, never showed any symptoms or illness. The MDR stuff is bad, but if we’re screening these kids we can find those cases and property deal with them.
This is yet another case of painting foreigners as diseased and threatening, which has been going on since forever.
Newsflash - we already have that here, not just from illegal aliens but also legal foreigners, tourists, and our own people returning from overseas, the last group being ones we don’t/can’t keep out.
Chagas disease are endemic to kissing bugs, which do not live in North America so it’s not going to get established in the US.
We shouldn’t have measles here, except for the jackasses who are needlessly afraid to vaccinate their children so that threat is our own damn fault.
Which is exactly why we need to tighten up the vaccination requirements and eliminate non-medical loopholes.
For that matter there IS a TB vaccine, as well as hepatitis vaccines. Maybe we should make more use of them.
Scabies and head lice are rampant among our own citizens, from the homeless to people in hospitals and nursing homes to children in school. I don’t know about this “taxpayers bearing the costs” thing - we sure as hell don’t help out our own when they catch these things. Maybe we should so we don’t spread them to new immigrants or when traveling aboard.
Not that the treatment for either is that horrific. Back at that clinic I mentioned, with the homeless and the non-hygienic, I did catch scabies off the clients. Easily treated. HAVING scabies is an ordeal, getting them treated is sweat relief.
As long as you’re OK with the possibility that a lot of countries with national health systems that treat rich and poor alike might start restricting US visitors based on how many of our citizens DON’T get appropriate treatment or preventive care due to financial issues running into our private healthcare “system”.
As noted - even a country like Mexico, with a buttload of problems and not nearly as much wealth as the US still manages to vaccinate their kid more reliably than we do.
Wait, are you saying “don’t consider the source, consider the information” AND “consider the source” in the same post? Please clarify if not!
Yeah, well, guess what? It don’t work.
It’s a good reason to take back control of the border from organized crime.
And that can best be done by* liberalizing *visas.
As we have seen with the recent avocado and lime shortages, Mexican organized crime looks for markets where it can exploit scarcity to charge a high price and line its pockets.
Liberalizing visas, letting migrants in with little more than a quick background screening for diseases, maybe some vaccinations and some quick cultural orientation classes, would collapse the coyotes’ market. And we could catch any of these migrants that have Tb pretty quickly.
Not the answer OP wanted, I imagine, but there it is.
Yes, we all remember the leprosy threat. :rolleyes:
The most important piece of information in any message is the name of the messenger.
Heck, just treat the U.S. like a reverse Roach Motel. Nobody gets in, and if you leave you can’t return.