Are Biden's immigration policies allowing dangerous diseases into our country?

Dr. Ashwin Vasan, New York City’s health commissioner, claims that the Biden administration’s border polices have produced an influx of migrants from the southern border who are bringing contagious diseases to New York City neighborhoods.

If Vasan is right, the administration should pause its programs for admitting migrants who have not gone through the visa application process until it has developed more effective methods for determining whether they are bringing communicable diseases into the country.

Why the administration’s policies attract so many undocumented migrants

Border security expert Todd Bensman says that whether migrants are willing to pay big fees to be smuggled across the border depends on how likely it is that they will be able get in and stay.

The likelihood of getting in and staying has been extraordinarily high during the Biden presidency. The administration has released more than 2 million illegal border crossers into the country, a number that would be much larger if it hadn’t had to expel more than 2 million illegal crossers pursuant to Title 42.

Moreover, the administration has virtually eliminated deportability for just being in the United States in violation of our laws. If illegal crossers can reach the interior of the country, it is extremely unlikely that they will be deported unless they are convicted for committing a serious crime here.

This also has made it worth the risk of incurring the expense of coming here from distant countries. 

For most of its history, the Border Patrol primarily encountered migrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The number of migrants coming from other countries has increased during the Biden presidency, which increases the likelihood that migrants are coming from countries that have uncontrolled communicable diseases.

The Border Patrol has combined “other country” statistics into a single category, which it has termed “historically atypical.”

In fiscal 2011, the Border Patrol encountered fewer than 8,000 migrants from historically atypical countries (3 percent of all encounters). By fiscal 2022, they encountered nearly 1 million migrants from historically atypical countries (43 percent of the encounters). And in the first six months of fiscal 2023, they encountered 557,310 migrants from historically atypical countries (53 percent of the encounters).

The migrants are coming from 160 different countries now. The majority of the migrants coming from historically atypical countries are coming from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua or Haiti. But some are coming from as far away as China and Afghanistan.

The administration is encouraging undocumented migrants to come to the United States by creating what it calls “legal pathways.” It claims that it is using harsher measures to discourage migrants from crossing illegally between ports of entry instead of using the legal pathways, but it is deporting fewer illegal border crossers than it did before it adopted the new measures.

One of the legal pathways is a humanitarian parole initiative that offers parole to up to 30,000 migrants a month from Venezuelan, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua who do not have visas. Another is the CBP One mobile application program, which migrants without visas use to schedule an appointment to present themselves for inspection at a designated port of entry. The administration has used this program to admit more than 133,000 asylum seekers.

Communicable diseases

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), chickenpox is rare in the United States. But Vasan says there have been outbreaks of chickenpox in the shelters housing recently arriving migrants.

The CDC says chickenpox is highly contagious. If one person has it, up to 90 percent of the people close to that person will also become infected unless they are immune. And it can be very serious, even life-threatening.

Vasan also says that these migrants are bringing polio, which can permanently paralyze a person. Paralysis is fatal in between 2 and 10 percent of the cases because it damages the muscles that are needed to breathe.

Due to the success of the national polio vaccination program, the last naturally occurring cases of polio in the United States occurred in 1979. More recent polio infections are the result of travel or contact with someone who had an oral polio vaccine in another country.

The United States uses injectable polio vaccines, which are made from dead polio virus that cannot spread the disease. Many poorer countries use an oral vaccine that contains live polio virus, which can shed into the infected person’s feces. The virus then can spread in sewage and on unclean hands.

Vasan says that the polio virus is being found in New York sewage that matches the strains of polio caused by oral vaccines.

Measles is another extremely contagious communicable disease that is being brought to the United States from other countries.

The CDC says that although measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, it has been brought to the United States in recent years by infected travelers from other countries and by Americans who are infected when they are in another country.

The Maryland Department of Health (MDH) has reported that a Maryland resident got malaria from someone who got it in another country and brought it to Maryland.

MDH Secretary Laura H. Scott said that, “Malaria was once common in the United States […] but we have not seen a case in Maryland that was not related to travel in over 40 years.”

Hansen’s disease — more commonly known as leprosy — is another example. It is very rare in the United States. But it has become endemic in Florida. According to CDC, circumstances indicate that the source of the leprosy was international migration of persons with the disease.

Apparently, therefore, Vasa’s concerns are legitimate.

This is a serious problem that the administration should address as soon as possible.

Nolan Rappaport was detailed to the House Judiciary Committee as an Executive Branch Immigration Law Expert for three years. He subsequently served as an immigration counsel for the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims for four years. Prior to working on the Judiciary Committee, he wrote decisions for the Board of Immigration Appeals for 20 years. Follow him at: https://nolanrappaport.blogspot.com