“The Department of Health and Human Services has declared a Public Health Emergency as a precautionary tool to ensure that we have the resources we need at our disposal to respond quickly and effectively,” Obama told a gathering of scientists, amid increasing worries worldwide about a possible pandemic.
In the United States, a private school in South Carolina was closed Monday because of fears that young people returning from Mexico might have been infected.”
Reverse colonization never took such a hard blow. A Mexican illegal is on the border, right now, hearing word about this, and has one foot in one country and one in the other. Maybe his thought process would go something like this: Go into the US at risk of swine flu but free medical care; go back to Mexico at risk of swine flu and not-so-great medical facilities.
I don’t think this changes much about our illegal immigration issue.
It does highlight a couple of important points though, and people tend to largely ignore these in the politically heated debate about illegal immigration:
As awful as the immigration worker in The Godfather Part II was to Vito Andolini by changing his name to Corleone, checking his eyes, ears, nose, and throat for sickness was a good thing for our nation. I know; I’m the child of a legal Italian immigrant, the family of whom was rejected three times at the embassy due to eye infection in one child.
Tolerance of everything except intolerance – this logic is hit hard by the simple reality that if you tolerate everything and everyone in a given society, you end up with no culture, no mores, nothing to which you can anchor your society. So “swine flu outbreak – let’s shut down the border for a while and sort this out, oh and by the way, we’re going to screen all passengers coming back from Mexico” becomes “swine flu – oh no – Obama will put the CDC into action and save us, all hail our savior!” We treat symptoms and effects in our society instead of causes: it’s sickening, it can’t last, and our country will crumble if we continue down this path.