Flights posing Ebola risk to U.S. continue

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration's unwillingness to ban air travel from the West African nations hit by the Ebola outbreak leaves the U.S. vulnerable to the disease, warns a top immigration expert.

Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea are the focus of the unprecedented outbreak, which has already taken 2,800 lives and could kill as many as 1.4 million by the end of January, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

"Until it's clear that the outbreak has stopped, no one from those three countries should be permitted to enter the U.S. and all visa issuance should be suspended," contended Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies.

"This matters, because there are well over 10,000 people from those countries who have visitor visas for the United States, some of them already here but many not," he said.

As WND reported, the United Nations World Health Organization has argued vigorously that cutting commercial airline service to the affected West African nations would only intensify the severity of the Ebola epidemic by restricting the ability of international health organizations to send qualified health professionals and supplies to the region to help combat the disease.

WND has also reported Air France pilots and aircrews have pushed through their flight unions for the right to refuse to fly to West Africa while the Ebola epidemic continues to rage.

The strain of Ebola affecting West Africa has an incubation period as long as 21 days, meaning an infected person not showing symptoms of the disease could be allowed to board a flight.

"Protecting the nation from epidemics would seem to be covered by even the narrowest interpretation of the Constitution's goal to 'promote the general welfare.'" Krikorian argued.

"To that end, federal law bars the admission of foreigners found to have 'a communicable disease of public health significance,'" he pointed out.

He said the regulations specifically list Ebola as such a disease, along with plague, cholera, smallpox, infectious tuberculosis and others.

Krikorian said that while the U.S. has dispatched the military to help contain the disease in West Africa, it does not appear to be taking the threat of transmission to the U.S. as seriously as it should.

As WND reported, Dr. Lee Hieb, former president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, also warned that such measures should be taken to prevent Ebola from coming to America.

“You don’t get Ebola from Europe,” she told WND. “You get Ebola from Africa. And it’s a really simple formula: Don’t let people fly to America if they’ve been to areas where there’s an outbreak. When there’s an outbreak, stop air [traffic] flow.”

The FAA has imposed no travel restrictions on U.S. flights to or from Liberia, Guinea or Sierra Leone, as well as other African nations reporting Ebola cases, including Senegal, Nigeria and Congo, Krikorian said.

Porous border

Krikorian said the nation's "porous border with Mexico is another weak point for disease transmission."

"During this summer's surge of Central American illegal aliens, the Department of Homeland Security was hard-pressed to screen for lesser diseases than Ebola, like tuberculosis or even just a skin infection like scabies," he said.

Krikorian insisted that while the risk was less from Ebola-infected illegal immigrants crossing the border, the danger should not be dismissed.

He noted that in 2012, more than 600 illegal aliens from the three Ebola countries were apprehended, both at the border and the interior, meaning many more eluded detection.

"Any immigration system that a simple busboy or farmhand can get past is one that a disease-carrier or terrorist can also get past," he reasoned.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a traveler's alert for all U.S. residents "to avoid travel to Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leon because of unprecedented outbreaks of Ebola in those countries."

Still, the CDC alert stops short of an air travel embargo, merely recommending "that travelers to these countries protect themselves by avoiding contact with the blood and body fluids of people who are sick with Ebola."

Delta and United are among the U.S. carriers continuing to run regularly scheduled flights to West Africa.

On Sept. 11, the CDC warned U.S. travelers that the Nigerian Ministry of Health issued a statement July 25 confirming the man who died of Ebola in Lagos, Nigeria, was infected with the disease in Liberia. He had traveled to Nigeria by commercial air travel before symptoms of the disease had become apparent.

A study published by the Center for Immigration Studies on Thursday showed that in 2013 the number of legal and illegal immigrants in the U.S. from predominantly Muslim countries had reached a total of nearly 2.5 million.

The same study also showed immigration into the U.S. from Sub-Saharan Africa, including Nigeria, totaled 1.5 million in 2013, with U.S. census data recording additional immigration from Sierra Leone and Liberia.