Give me your tired, your poor, your huddle masses yearning to breathe free … your citizens infected with STDs.
If we didn’t see this coming when he played “African roulette” with American lives by refusing to ban incoming flights from Ebola-stricken countries, it is now clear. Barack Obama would sooner risk the lives of his own constituents than deny access to immigrants infected with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
The Center for Immigration Studies reports:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
In his first year in office, President Obama lifted an entry ban on foreigners with HIV. In his final year in office he will lift the entry ban on three more sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The president’s own Health and Human Services department says this guarantees more infections in the United States, proving once again that immigration is the defining issue for politicians like Obama. Increased immigration trumps all other concerns.
First, some background. In 1993, a clause specifically designed to reduce the spread HIV/AIDS into the United States was added to the Immigration and Nationality Act. It passed the Senate with a vote of 76 to 23. It reads:
Any alien who is determined (in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services) to have a communicable disease of public health significance, which shall include infection with the etiologic agent for acquired immune deficiency syndrome [AIDS] … is inadmissible.
Though the law is clear that AIDS is to be considered “a communicable disease of public health significance”, today it is the responsibility of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to determine whether a disease meets that threshold. This is due to a law signed by immigration advocate President George W. Bush in 2008. The Obama administration picked up the ball and ran with Bush’s open-border vision and decided in 2009 that HIV is not a “communicable disease of public health significance”.
Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner adds:
The website Law 360 first revealed the rules change. “Under the change, the STIs granuloma inguinale, chancroid and lymphogranuloma venereum would no longer be considered a ‘communicable disease of public health significance,'” said the website. Quoting HHS, it added, “The three bacterial infections are transmitted through sexual contact, have never been common in the United States and over the past two decades are observed to be increasingly rare throughout the world.”
Bear in mind that the health risks to the U.S. population constitute only one downside of the move. There is also a monetary cost in providing health care to the newcomers:
Obama’s HHS secretary ran the numbers and explained in the Federal Register that “The results are not economically significant, i.e. more than $100 million of costs and benefits in a single year.” In other words, the cost of welcoming in aliens with these STDs will be below $100 million every year.
The president will tell you that $100 million is a drop in the bucket. Against a backdrop of a $19 trillion national debt ($8 trillion of which Obama added), there’s some validity to that claim. Yet, the notion of financing the arrival of immigrants to further burden our already overtaxed health care system seems obscene.
