Tom Tancredo must be having a conniption right now. Lou Dobbs must be rolling over in his…chair.
Why all the commotion? It turns out that Atlanta police arrested and imprisoned a young man with a name like Francisco Santos not for robbery, not for murder, not for gang violence, but for threatening to go back to Mexico. No forced extradition. No 20-foot walls. Totally voluntary.
Of course, this is over-simplifying the story. It turns out that 17-year old Mr. Santos had recently been diagnosed with a case of highly contagious tuberculosis, or TB, which despite being a well-controlled disease in the U.S. of A., has the potential to reach epidemic proportions in less advanced nations, killing about 2 million people per year worldwide.
This incident recalls the case of Andrew Speaker, a 31-year old lawyer also from Atlanta. Mr. Speaker had traveled around the world while carrying a drug-resistant strain of TB, and was eventually denied entry into the U.S. on any commercial carrier by the CDC last May. His decision to fly back on a commercial flight anyway, due largely to the $100,000 cost of a chartered plane and the urgent need for proper medical treatment, caused a national uproar.
Santos was arrested when he refused medical treatment for his tuberculosis, threatening instead to return to Mexico where he might spread the disease. According to the Associated Press,
An average of four TB patients are confined in Georgia each year, said Taka Wiley, a spokeswoman for the Georgia Department of Human Resources.
Still like that wall idea, Senator Tancredo?
