An “Ancient Killer” Returns to California — Courtesy of Illegal Aliens?

If your three children all got sick the day after a new kid came over to play, you’d have a decent clue about who the vector of disease was. This comes to mind with the reintroduction in California of an ancient killer: tuberculosis (TB).

The world’s deadliest infectious disease, TB caused an estimated 1.23 million deaths worldwide in 2024. In fact, approximately 10.7 million people were sickened by it that year. And the disease ranks among the top 10 overall causes of global mortality.

Of course, far from new, TB is one of man’s “oldest continuously existing diseases,” wrote commentator Andrea Widburg Friday. “Confirmed cases have been found in mummies dating as far back as 3,000 B.C.” Evidence, though, “suggests that the TB gene goes back tens of thousands of years.” Widburg adds that it was also

one of the great killers in 18th- and 19th-century Europe and America. In the early 1800s, it is estimated to have caused 25% of urban deaths in the U.S., and was probably the leading overall single cause of death in America before antibiotics. And now it’s back.

Reporting on the story, the New York Post writes:

California health officials are scrambling after tuberculosis exposures were confirmed at multiple schools as cases of the world’s deadliest infectious disease continue climbing across the state.

Fresno County officials confirmed a cluster at Justin Garza High School, where one active infection was found, though authorities did not specify whether the case involved a student or staff, according to ABC30.

Officials emphasized no one on campus is currently contagious, but 22 out of 169 people exposed have tested positive for the infection, though they show no symptoms yet.

… Meanwhile, San Diego County officials announced Wednesday a potential TB exposure was also reported at Sunset Elementary School in San Ysidro.

San Diego County has seen TB cases steadily rise in recent years, from 193 reported cases in 2020 to 265 in 2025.

These recent school exposures are just the latest in a troubling series of incidents unfolding across California.

Widburg doesn’t think it’s coincidental that this is happening in the Golden State. For California is, as historian Victor Davis Hanson put it in 2019, our first “Third World State.” And what are the TB disease vectors in this case?

It’s the Third World people, Widburg suspects — illegal aliens, that is — who’ve brought the disease back to California. And the state’s rampant vagrancy likely facilitates its spread.

Plenty of Warnings

Widburg is no medical expert, and she admits she can’t prove her thesis. Plenty of experts, however, have often sung similar tunes. And they’ve had ample opportunity to since the aforementioned isn’t our first disease-reintroduction rodeo.

For example, there was in 2014 a strange outbreak across the Midwest of Enterovirus D68. (It’s related to the common cold but causes severe respiratory illness.) Sometime before this outbreak, too, the Barack Obama administration had reportedly coerced schools into accepting possibly sick illegal-alien children.

Experts sounded the alarm. As professor of medicine at New York University’s Langone Medical Center Dr. Marc Siegel warned in July 2014:

As many as 50,000 children, mostly from Central American countries … are not being detained for the purpose of identifying illness, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement relying on self-report of symptoms, and many have already been sent to other states, where disease can spread.

And it did.

Then-radio host (now podcaster) Michael Savage also weighed in. Note here that he boasts a Ph.D. in epidemiology and the authorship of almost 20 books on health and nutrition. As he stated on his show in 2014:

This population in America, which once enjoyed the greatest health on earth, is now being devolved into a second-world nation in terms of health because Obama is so corrupt….

Instead of stopping disease spread, they’re [health officials and doctors] encouraging it by not speaking out against bringing in infected children and putting them in our public schools…. What do you expect to happen if you put a kid with a certain virus into a school where they’ve never been exposed to that virus? It’s called an epidemic breakout.

This problem goes back even further in history, too. Just consider a warning issued by the late Dr. Madeleine Cosman, a medical lawyer and City College of New York professor. She stated in 2005 that illegal aliens had already brought “horrendous diseases” into the United States, “such as tuberculosis … Chagas Disease, leprosy, [and] malaria.”

Some other diseases illegals are suspected of reintroducing are:

• Measles;
• Scabies;
• Mumps, influenza, and varicella (chickenpox);
• Syphilis and gonorrhea; and
• flaccid myelitis.

No Joke

Of all these, however, TB may be the scariest. As Widburg points out, it has

adapted to the antibiotics that once worked so powerfully against it, and has now morphed into a variety of forms, many of which are resistant to any of the normal antibiotic treatments.

Drug-resistant TB doesn’t have to be fatal (although it can be), but it’s expensive and very slow to treat. Moreover, because the antibiotics are unpleasant, people stop taking them before the disease is completely cured … which is how we ended up with resistant TB in the first place.

Speaking of expense, what does the mitigation of diseases potentially linked to illegal migration cost us in total? An AI analysis I ran put the price tag at $400 million to $1.2 billion annually.

Really, though, the main point is the same whether being discussed is illegal-alien-related disease, crime, strain on resources and infrastructure, or something else. That is, this is why serious and authentically civilized nations have zero tolerance for illegal migration (and vagrancy). It will cause problems and pain and be paid for in not just money, but also blood, sweat, and tears.

Another matter: In this case, what happens in California doesn’t stay in California. For sick people can travel from states that facilitate illegal-alien habitation to more sanely run states. This could make one wonder, too, about the rogue states blithely defying federal immigration law. If they can make their own immigration policy, can other states not follow suit? Can’t, for safety’s sake, the latter then institute border controls and checks with abutting illegal-migration-enabling states?

After all, if the Mexican border means nothing to California, then the California border starts to mean a heck of a lot to its non-Third World neighbors.