Americans deserve tuberculosis says Star Tribune
Issue 67: March 30, 2001

Immigration is doubling U.S. population within the lifetime of today’s college students.
(source: Census Bureau)

+== TIME OUT PROJECT ==+

In a March 23 editorial timed to coincide with something called World Tuberculosis Day, the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote, "One in three people around the world is infected with the bacteria that cause TB. At least 100 million have active cases…In Minnesota, the TB tally is going up — largely because of the state’s swelling immigrant population. Four out of five Minnesota TB patients are foreign-born. The cases originated in 53 different countries."

Scary stuff. Tuberculosis is a virulent disease long thought to have been under control in this country.

Today, however, irresponsible and unfair immigration policies are allowing new and more drug resistant strains of this highly contagious disease to be imported wholesale — on the backs, so to speak, of record-breaking numbers of cheap foreign laborers.

While a mass influx of cheap labor benefits the SUV and latte crowd, and probably upper middle class white newspaper editors, it unfairly leaves exposed those Americans on the lower end of the economic scale — many of whom struggle to maintain adequate health insurance (a struggle made more difficult, ironically, by direct economic competition with newcomers, since immigration hurts America’s poor first and worst).

Probably, most Americans see the huge injustice of this. So what should be done? One obvious solution would be to implement an immigration time-out so that we can devise mechanisms to protect America’s most vulnerable citizens — including recent immigrants — from this direct and unacceptable health threat.

But the Minneapolis Star Tribune would have none of that. "Cracking down on immigration is no answer," the Star Tribune writes. Because "America is a land of immigrants."

Puzzled? You should be. The statement that Americans are helpless to control mass immigration simply because we are a "land of immigrants" is absurd, false and meaningless.

It is false because only 10% of us are, in fact, immigrants, which hardly makes us a "land of immigrants."

And it is meaningless because if by "land of immigrants" the Star Tribune is including ancestry, then ALL countries are lands of immigrants and the United States has no exceptionalist reason to swamp itself.

But the Star Tribune goes farther. Not only are we unable to "crack down on immigration" since we are a "land of immigrants," but we shouldn’t besides. In a prime example of the ageless Western missionary impulse to run out and save the world, Minnesota’s leading paper opines that we should take no steps to lessen the health threat to Americans since "the United States is largely to blame… several decades back it slashed funding for global TB control."

In other words, Americans deserve it.

http://projectusa.org/immigration-health-threat.html
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00054855.htm
http://www.vdare.com/mcconnell/mcconnell_TB.htm
http://www.fairus.org/html/04149711.htm

+== TAKE POSITIVE ACTION ==+

The Minneapolis Star Tribune is a respected and influential paper. But, on this issue of mass immigration, it consistently takes an editorially irresponsible position.

You can contact the paper and ask it to please reexamine its position on mass immigration — current policies hurt working Americans and recent immigrants.

Lou Gelfand, Reader representative, readerrep@gw.startribune.com

Minneapolis Star-Tribune
425 Portland Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55488
Ph: 612-673-4000
Fax: 612-673-4359
opinion@startribune.com

+== QUOTE OF THE WEEK ==+

Now, since I, being a nobleman, am in the secret too, think how tedious to me must be your unending cant about all these moralistic figments, and how squalidly disastrous your sacrifice of your lives to them! If you even believed in your moral game enough to play it fairly, it would be interesting to watch; but you don’t: you cheat at every trick; and if your opponent out cheats you, you upset the table and try to murder him.

G.B. Shaw’s Don Juan (1903)

+== E-MAIL OF THE WEEK ==+

Please add me to your email list. I think your web page is terrific! It sets a positive tone. Your billboards are getting better too! …By the way your pie chart on the actual number of immigrants that built the country was outstanding! Maybe you can use them on your billboards too!

Tags:   immigration · Minnesota · Star Tribune · TB · tuberculosisNo Comments