Per my mild threadjacking of Cranky’s post about the TB scare. The New York Times unintentionally delivers a barbed wire into the fence of anti-illegal immigration nazis such as Chuck Schumer:

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said the mistake at the border was a sign that the Customs and Border Protection bureau was stretched too thin, with just 4,000 agents along a northern border that is required by law to have 5,000.

“The agents of the Customs and Border Control bureau are our first line of defense,” Mr. Schumer said. “We cannot afford even one mistake in an incident such as this.”

This is in response to the TB traveler who sent the CDC and ministries of health all over the world into their little Outbreak monkeysuits due to one passenger having to be quarantined. You know, because *one* is too many. We can’t afford “even one mistake in an incident such as this.”

No word on Schumer’s proposal for many thousands more Customs and Border Protection bureaus being stretched too thin to stop a potential pandemic from undocumented carriers infecting us through our porous southern border.

In Atlanta, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they had reached 74 passengers out of 310 from the United States, including all 26 people who were in the rows closest to Mr. Speaker on the flight to Paris. The agency is focusing only on American citizens, said Julie L. Gerberding, the director of the centers; she said other nations should be contacting their own citizens. The passengers are being advised to have tuberculosis tests immediately, and to have follow-up tests in several weeks.

Per the Center for Disease Control on Mexico’s tuberculosis rate:

TB disease among foreign-born persons living in the United States is increasing. In 1999, 43% (7,553) of the 17,531 TB cases reported in the United States were among foreign-born persons, compared with 24% (6,262) of the 25,701 cases reported in 1990. In 1999, Mexico was the country of origin for 23% (1,753) of all foreign-born persons with TB. Of TB cases among Mexican-born persons, three fourths were reported from the four U.S. states bordering Mexico: California, 820 cases; Texas, 364 cases; Arizona, 67 cases; and New Mexico, 17 cases (3). In 1999, TB cases among Mexican-born persons represented approximately 25% of all reported TB in the four border states. Incidence of TB was higher for the majority of border counties than the national TB rate.

Oh, well. The price of progress as they say. Can’t make juevos rancheros without a few tuberculosis infected eggs. Too bad we can’t confine the TB to Captain Ed’s ship and the incessantly short-circuited Paul Mirengoff at Powerline. But then again, Hindrocket is the only reason to read Powerline anyway as he butts in to Mirengoff’s characteristic bootlickery of the Republican Establishment as “Bush just being Bush and you have no right to complain”:

Bush is about two more noble actions away from being ridden out of Washington on a rail.
[...]
For a leader of a democracy to ignore politics is not commendable idealism; it is irresponsibility.

Lot of nice graphs and migration charts at the CDC. Doubtful that Mirengoff and Morrisey will care as one is simply off the grid (or never been on the grid in the first place) and the other is forever lost at sea.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 2nd, 2007 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Bloggery, Illegal Immigration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.