Lice, hepatitis, TB, chicken pox, scabies plague a third of the caravan migrants – and now there's rain

As I write this from San Diego, the rain is pouring outside my window, a rare winter rain brought on by an offshore tropical storm blowing in from the west. It's heavy, dripping, dropping rain, and it's getting the entire region good. Normally, rain is a cause for rejoicing in these parts, because drought is the norm, and rain makes everything turn green. But you don't want to be out in that rain, which is where the Tijuana caravan migrants are, just south of San Diego, soaking up rain, mud, germs, cold, bacteria, viruses – and picking up diseases.

Right now, it's happening in Tijuana, where 6,000 migrants are still camped out. Fox News reports that more than a third, some 2,200 of them are being treated for lice, scabies, chicken pox, hepatitis, HIV, tuberculosis, and infections. The San Diego television press reported last night that measles has also been detected in the squalid encampment, where new caravans are arriving even as some pack up and go home.

Screen grab from Fox News, via YouTube. So much for the insistence from the left that the migrants are disease-free, and any concern about public health issues is easily explained as xenophobia, as Vox claimed. Boston Public Radio WGBH echo-chambered that in the true JournoList tradition of Vox founder Ezra Klein (it's as though they talk to each other, no?) seizing on the small discrepancy in a U.S. agent's claim about "smallpox" when he likely meant "chicken pox" – which sure enough, has turned up among the migrants. Such a phony, phony argument. With the latest Fox News report, these media claims did not age well. Nobody should be camping out in unsanitary conditions in that rain. What a vile group the caravan organizers are to allow such inhuman conditions to occur. Any public health official anywhere in the world could tell you that any time you move large groups of people without sanitation, housing, or basic necessities, you are going to get diseases spreading throughout that population. For the organizers, with their rabidly leftist desire to charge the border and break it down as new Che Guevaras, casualties are a mere detail. What's mass casualties compared to the glory of challenging Donald Trump at the gates to the American empire? And as the left continues to press Trump to allow the migrants in, the reality remains that to allow foreign nationals into the U.S. bearing chicken pox, hepatitis, measles, tuberculosis, infections, scabies, lice – and the whole plethora of new ailments that is sure to come of the plague of rain on Tijuana – is absolutely irresponsible, a recipe for spreading disease into the U.S. citizen population. In times past, Ellis Island screened out arriving immigrants for any sign of disease. Today, illegal immigration dispenses with that nicety, and all comers enter. Open borders means open disease, and for everyone. Mass illegal migration has since coincided with an amazing collection of new disease outbreaks now being seen in California, the nation's pestilence capital, and the home of a quarter of the nation's illegals. San Diego got a hepatitis outbreak. Los Angeles has typhus. Now there's a polio-like disease that Dr. Brian Joondeph raised questions about. Uncontrolled borders also correspond to the appearance of heretofore unknown diseases in the Los Angeles area, such as leprosy and chagas disease, the latter of which up until now had been primarily seen in Central America. What a coincidence. The rains are coming down hard now, and one can only pity the migrants who were such putty in the hands of these leftist organizers, and more are arriving. A third of them have got diseases now in their squalid camps, and with the rains pouring, that figure is going to grow exponentially. Image credit: Fox News, via YouTube, screen grab.