Having a moderately effective public health system has made Americans forget that a major function of borders has been to keep out communicable disease. In the Godfather II film, young Vito Corleone is quarantined for three months because he is feared to have smallpox.

Below, in the Godfather II film, immigrant males are given a health exam on Ellis Island.

That fictional story was realistically set in 1901, but nowadays we imagine our amazing medical advances allow us to ignore the necessity of quarantine, which seems so antiquated. Or at least thats what the administration wants us to think anything to maintain open borders.

In fact, public health is not on the to-do list for this administration at all, to judge from the continuing unrestricted entry of persons coming from the ebola hot zone via airports, not to mention the open southern border.

Ebola is the big public health threat today because it is communicable and its ease of transmission remains somewhat mysterious. But tuberculosis, a major killer in earlier centuries, has not gone away and it is still lethal, particularly in the third world, whose residents our open borders invite. In fact, the strain of TB that exists in Central America is said to be drug resistant.

Crowded government flophouses, like the one shown below in Brownsville, can promote the spread of TB.



