Over 2,500 Mexican citizens are ill with the H1N1 virus and at least 168 have died since the first case was diagnosed. In the U.S., there are now 133 reported cases in eleven states and a 2-year-old Mexican toddler in Houston has died from the disease.
As of press time, two cases were identified in Colorado.
Suspected cases are now reported in two dozen nations in Europe and Asia in addition to the three nations of North America. The World Health Organization has classified the epidemic as a Level 5 contagion, one level below a pandemic.
The White House has announced “travel advisories” warning Americans to avoid non-essential travel to Mexico, and airport inspectors are asking persons arriving from Mexico about flu symptoms. But oddly, there is no concern about the 2,000 illegal immigrants who enter our country each day from Mexico along the 1,950-mile southwest border.
Why have we not closed the border with Mexico, or at least called out the National Guard to help halt all illegal entry? Democratic Congressman Eric Massa of New York has called for closing the border, by which he probably means closing the ports of entry. However, if we want to prevent all unauthorized entry, that would require using the military, because we have fencing on only 340 miles of the border and inadequate Border Patrol manpower.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will talk only about the “passive screening” of legal visitors at ports of entry to ask about flu symptoms. She is not sending the National Guard — or, God forbid, the Marines — to help the undermanned Border Patrol. Apparently, Napolitano expects the Mexicans crossing the Arizona-Sonora desert to self-report any flu symptoms to the nearest Border Patrol station.
President Barack Obama’s statement that closing the borders would be akin to locking the barn door after the horse is stolen is nonsensical. It is plainly illogical to institute closer scrutiny of legal arrivals at airports and other ports of entry while remaining silent about the 60,000 illegal border crossers who come from Mexico each month. Memo to Secretary Napolitano: The 60,000 “horses” coming in May are still in the barn, so please go lock the barn door.
Napolitano’s lack of attention to border control is consistent with a 2007 State Department document, North American Plan for Avian and Pandemic Influenza, produced by the Security and Prosperity Partnership. Nowhere in this “planning document” is there any mention of a contingency plan for closing the borders to prevent the spread of disease — not even in its earliest stages.
Some observers have noticed that Mexico was slow in notifying the World Health Organization of the epidemic. Over 400 cases of an “atypical pneumonia” were noticed in the Vera Cruz region in mid-March, but Mexican health officials had to wait for experts at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to verify the cases as swine flu. Did the delay in the official recognition of the epidemic have anything to do with President Obama’s planned visit to Mexico City on April 16?
No one can know the impact the H1N1 virus will have in the U.S., but the potential for infectious diseases crossing our borders has been known for years. There is, after all, a good reason for the requirement of a health screening for legal immigrants. The problem is, open borders make a mockery of this common sense precaution.
If Obama and Napolitano can acknowledge the need to scrutinize legal arrivals from Mexico, why can’t they recognize the danger posed to both national security and public health from tens of thousands of illegal arrivals? We can only hope that the price we pay for this willful blindness is not catastrophic.
Any alert citizen not blinded by political correctness understands the need for border security for a host of reasons. Should we expect less from elected leaders who took an oath to defend the United States “against all enemies, foreign and domestic”?
Tom Tancredo is a former five-term U.S. representative for Colorado’s 6th Congressional District and is chairman of the Rocky Mountain Foundation.
