The influx of illegal aliens has serious hidden medical
consequences. We judge reality primarily by what we see. But what
we do not see can be more dangerous, more expensive, and more
deadly than what is seen....
What is unseen is their free medical care that has degraded and
closed some of America's finest emergency medical facilities, and
caused hospital bankruptcies: 84 California hospitals are closing
their doors. 'Anchor babies' born to illegal aliens instantly qualify
as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in
Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income
and Disability Income....
By default, we grant health passes to illegal aliens. Yet many
illegal aliens harbor fatal diseases that American medicine fought
and vanquished long ago, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis,
malaria, leprosy, plague, polio, dengue, and Chagas disease.
What is seen is the political statistic that 43 million lives are at
risk in America because of lack of medical insurance. What is
unseen is that medical insurance does not equal medical care.
Uninsured people receive medical care in hospital emergency
departments (EDs) under the coercive Emergency Medical
Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985 (EMTALA), which
obligates hospitals to treat the uninsured but does not pay for that
care. Also unseen is the percentage of the uninsured who are illegal
aliens. No one knows how many illegal aliens reside in America. If
there are 10 million, they constitute nearly 25 percent of the
uninsured. The percentage could be even higher.
The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act
(EMTALA) requires every ED to treat anyone who enters with an
'emergency' - including cough, headache, hangnail, cardiac arrest,
herniated lumbar disc, drug addiction, alcohol overdose, gunshot
wound, automobile trauma, human immunodeficiency virus
(HIV)-positive infection, mental problem, or personality disorder.... Any patient coming to a hospital ED
requesting 'emergency' care must be screened and treated until
ready for discharge, or stabilized for transfer - whether or not
insured, 'documented,' or able to pay. A woman in labor must
remain to deliver her child.
...EMTALA is an unfunded federal
mandate. Government imposes viciously stiff fines and penalties
on any physician and any hospital refusing to treat any patient that a
zealous prosecutor deems an emergency patient, even though the
hospital or physician screened and declared the patient's illness or
injury non-emergency....
High-technology EDs have degenerated into free medical
offices. Between 1993 and 2003, 60 California hospitals closed
because half their services became unpaid. Another 24 California
hospitals verge on closure. Even ambulances from Mexico come to
American EDs with indigents because the drivers know that
EMTALA requires accepting patients who come.
...Los Angeles County Trauma Care Network, built in 1983, was
one of America's finest emergency medical response
organizations.... EMTALA contributed to the Trauma Care Network's
loss of focus and loss of money....
In Los Angeles, 95 percent of outstanding
homicide warrants are for illegal aliens, as are 66 percent of fugitive
felony warrants. The notorious 18 Street Gang has 20,000
members, of whom 60 to 80 percent are illegal aliens, according to
the California Department of Justice and the Los Angeles Police
Department, respectively....
Illegal aliens move freely in crime sanctuary cities. In Los
Angeles, San Diego, Stockton, New York, Chicago, Miami, Austin,
and Houston, no hospital, physician, city employee, or police
officer is permitted to report immigration violators to the
Department of Homeland Security's Bureau of Immigration and
Customs Enforcement... Los Angeles Police Department, begun in 1979 by Chief Daryl Gates, prohibits police
officers from 'initiating police action where the objective is to
discover the alien status of a person.'
As many as 10,000 illegals cross the 1,940-mile-long border
with Mexico each day. About 33 percent are caught. Many try
again, immediately. Authorities estimate about 3,500 illegal aliens
daily become permanent U.S. residents - at least 3 million
annually. EMTALA rewards them with extensive, expensive
medical services, free of charge, if they claim an emergency need
for care....
Anchor Babies
American hospitals welcome 'anchor babies.' Illegal alien
women come to the hospital in labor and drop their little anchors,
each of whom pulls its illegal alien mother, father, and siblings into
permanent residency simply by being born within our borders.
Anchor babies... instantly qualify for public welfare
aid. Between 300,000 and 350,000 anchor babies annually
become citizens because of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution: 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States,
and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United
States and the State wherein they reside.'
In 2003 in Stockton, California, 70 percent of the 2,300 babies
born in San Joaquin General Hospital's maternity ward were
anchor babies, and 45 percent of Stockton children under age six are
Latino (up from 30 percent in 1993). In 1994, 74,987 anchor
babies in California hospital maternity units cost $215 million and
constituted 36 percent of all Medi-Cal births. Now they account for
substantially more than half....
Illegal aliens have translators, advocates, and middlemen
supplied by immigrants' civil rights groups or by Medicaid.
MediCal in 2003 had 760,000 illegal aliens, up from 2002 when
there were 470,000. Supplemental Security Income is a nonmeans-
tested federal grant of money and food stamps. People
qualify easily. Scams, frauds, and cheats are rampant....
Among the organizations directing illegal aliens into America's
medical systems are the Ford Foundation-funded Mexican
American Legal Defense and Education Fund; the National
Immigration Law Center; the American Immigration Lawyers
Association; the American Bar Association's Commission on
Immigration Policy, Practice, and Pro Bono; the Immigrant Legal
Resource Center; the National Council of George Soros's
Open Society Institute; the Migration Policy Institute; the National
Network for Immigration and Refugee Rights; and the Southern
Poverty Law Center. And there are more...
Immigrants on SSI, including legal aliens, refugees, and illegals
with fraudulent Social Security cards, numbered a mere 127,900
aliens (3.3 percent of recipients) in 1982. By 1992 the numbers
expanded to 601,430 entitled (10.9 percent of recipients). In 2003,
this figure was several million (about 25 percent of recipients).
The National Immigration Law Center (NILC) proudly
announced that it garnered for immigrants expensive cancer
treatments, prenatal care, and critical health services by means of its
litigation....
Many illegals who cross our borders have tuberculosis. That disease
had largely disappeared from America, thanks to excellent hygiene
and powerful modern drugs such as isoniazid and rifampin.
TB's swift, deadly return now is lethal for about 60 percent of those
infected because of new Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDRTB).
Until recently MDR-TB was endemic to Mexico....
TB was virtually absent in Virginia until in 2002, when it spiked
a 17 percent increase, but Prince William County, just south of
Washington, D.C., had a much larger rise of 188 percent. Public
health officials blamed immigrants. In 2001 the Indiana School of
Medicine studied an outbreak of MDR-TB, and traced it to
Mexican illegal aliens. The Queens, New York, health department
attributed 81 percent of new TB cases in 2001 to immigrants....
Chagas disease, also called American trypanosomiasis or
'kissing bug' disease is transmitted by the reduviid bug, which
prefers to bite the lips and face. The protozoan parasite that it
carries, infects 18 million people annually in
Latin America and causes 50,000 deaths. This disease also
infiltrates America's blood supply....
Leprosy, a scourge in Biblical days and in medieval Europe, so
horribly destroys flesh and faces it was called the 'disease of the
soul.'... Leprosy, Hansen's
disease, was so rare in America that in 40 years only 900 people were
afflicted. Suddenly, in the past three years America has more than
7,000 cases of leprosy. Leprosy now is endemic to northeastern
states because illegal aliens and other immigrants brought leprosy
from India, Brazil, the Caribbean, and Mexico.
Dengue fever is exceptionally rare in America, though
common in Ecuador, Peru, Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh,
Malaysia, and Mexico. Recently there was a virulent outbreak
of dengue fever in Webb County, Texas, which borders Mexico....
Polio was eradicated from America, but now reappears in illegal
immigrants, as do intestinal parasites. Malaria was obliterated,
but now is re-emerging in Texas.... Asians number 4
percent of Americans, but account for more than half of Hepatitis B
cases.
CRAG: A Proposal to Prevent Medical Cataclysm
Tough medicine could end the cataclysm in American
medicine. I suggest the acronym CRAG for four critical actions to
reclaim America's EDs; to restore medicine's proud scientific
excellence and profitability; and to protect Americans against
bacterial, viral, parasitic, and fungal infectious diseases that illegal
aliens carry across our borders.
Close America's borders.
Prevent illegal entry with fences,
high-tech security devices, and troops re-deployed from Germany
and South Korea. Deport illegal aliens. Homeland Security's
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a division of Detention
and Removal dedicated to deportation. It is hobbled by the
powerful Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the
Department of Justice court system that consists of the U.S.
Immigration Court (USIC) plus an appellate court, the Board of
Immigration Appeals (BIA)....
Rescind the citizenship of anchor babies
We must overturn the
misinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution. The Constitution grants citizenship to all persons
born or naturalized in the United States and "subject to the
jurisdiction thereof." An illegal alien mother is subject to the
jurisdiction of her country. The baby of an illegal alien mother
also is subject to that home country's jurisdiction.
When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, its purpose was
to assure rights of freedom and citizenship to newly emancipated
Negro citizens. American Indians, however, were excluded from
American citizenship because of their tribal jurisdiction. Also not
subject to American jurisdiction were foreign visitors,
ambassadors, consuls, and their babies born here. For citizenship,
the person was required to submit to complete, exclusive American
jurisdiction, owing allegiance to no other nation.
Long ago the Supreme Court correctly confirmed this restricted
interpretation of citizenship in the so-called 'Slaughter-House
cases' [83 US 36 (1873)] and in [112 US 94 (1884)].
In Elk v.Wilkins, the phrase 'subject to its jurisdiction'
excluded from its operation 'children of ministers, consuls, and
citizens of foreign states born within the United States.' In Elk, the
American Indian claimant was born in America, but considered not
An American citizen because the law required him to be 'not merely
subject in some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United
States, but completely subject to their political jurisdiction and
owing them direct and immediate allegiance.' To obtain
citizenship, an American Indian had to separate from his tribe and
be accepted by the United States as a citizen. A special act of
Congress was needed to grant full citizenship to American Indians.
The Citizens Act of 1924, codified in 8USCSß1401, provides that:
The following shall be nationals and citizens of the United
States at birth:
(a) a person born in the United States and subject to
the jurisdiction thereof;
(b) a person born in the United States to a member of
an Indian, Eskimo, Aleutian, or other aboriginal
tribe.
Congress by legislation has the right to create uniform rules on
naturalization, and to create dual citizenship and similar variations
upon 'jurisdiction.' We must be vigilant against congressmen
voting to extend the list of those born here to include illegal aliens
or other lawbreakers, conferring American citizenship and its
generous social and medical benefits on babies born to criminals....
Aiding and abetting illegal aliens is a crime.
Punish it. This will anger devotees of illegal aliens who believe that the Constitution
guarantees them civil rights that trump American administrative,
civil, and criminal laws.
Grant no new amnesties. We must choose either to surrender
medicine to illegal aliens, or to fight illegal aliens. Surrender to
illegal aliens is surrender to collectivist America: land of moral
ambiguity and home of pacifist appeasement. Fighting against
illegal aliens is fighting for individualistic America: land of moral
strength, and home of responsible liberty.
As we fight to reclaim medicine, so we defend our nation.
Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Ph.D., Esq., is a medical lawyer, who formerly
taught medical students at the City University of New York.
