Regarding that leprosy story David linked to below: Last year Lou Dobbs was attacked for having on his show a medical lawyer who asserted that immigration was introducing exotic diseases, including leprosy, into the United States. In Dobbs’s defense, the woman had published on this in a medical journal (see pdf of her article here), and the incidence of leprosy has been rising pretty steadily since 2000. But the guest clearly got her numbers wrong, something which doesn’t surprise me, having met her and heard her speak, and so she and Dobbs definitely deserved to be called on it. Obviously, though, even if she (and Dobbs) had been more careful, the usual suspects (the NY Times, Media Matters, the Southern Poverty Law Center — sorry, I’m repeating myself) would have attacked them just as fiercely, treating them like, well lepers, just for bringing up the subject.

This is where we come back to the Arkansas story; the appearance of leprosy there is not because of L’il Abner and Daisy Mae: “It’s from the Marshall islands; that’s why we’re seeing it,” according to a local doctor. See, Springdale, Ark., has the largest population of Marshallese outside their home islands, brought to America to pluck chickens for Tyson Foods. Oh, this too: “Springdale is also reporting over 100 cases of tuberculosis.”

Any discussion of immigration and disease is potentially inflammatory and needs to be careful and sober. But that doesn’t mean you can simply avert your eyes, which is what we’ve been doing for too long.