THE PUBLIC MIND: DOES AMERICA HAVE TO ACCEPT WORLD'S AIDS CARRIERS?

To the Editor:

I am appalled by an item in US News reporting the Justice Department maintains that keeping immigrants who are HIV positive (for AIDS) out of the country is illegal.

Oh? Somewhere in the Constitution the founding fathers wrote that we had to allow every Tom, Dick and Harry into the country regardless of their medical or criminal history? I am reminded of the time during the unfortunate years of President Carter when Castro was sending thousands of nut cases and the most vile criminals out of Cuba. Our esteemed Justice Department decided that even though many of them were landing on our shores in sail boats or inner-tubes or by some other illegal means, they were entitled to due process once they set foot on shore. Which of course meant we had to go through a lengthy and expensive process of deporting them, and in most cases never accomplished the deed, adding to the woes of an already overburdened law enforcement and mental health system in South Florida.

Can it be true we have laws or regulations that say we must allow into our country and into our welfare and healthcare systems, at public expense, every AIDS-carrying homosexual and drug addict from every country around the world?

"Both federal agencies (Justice and Immigration) agree that tourists and short-term visitors should be allowed in, though the disease list applies to tourists as well as immigrants," the magazine said in its June 10 edition.

If so, it's time our congressmen got busy and wrote a law that said it's a privilege, not a right to visit or immigrate into these United States. Fuzzy-headed liberal bureaucratic thinking like we are seeing from these two agencies is another reason that masses are losing faith, and patience, with the federal government in general, and the administration, the courts, and the Congress in particular.

The reason the AIDS-carrying homosexuals and druggies want to enter the country, of course, is to avail themselves to our public healthcare system. The magazine report preceded by a few days the release of a study by 26 big-city mayors reporting that none of the city governments expected to be able to meet projected future health and education service for people infected with HIV, the AIDS virus. So, of course, the federal government was to make up the slack. Many Americans feel that the AIDS epidemic doesn't affect them, but obviously it does, through costs to our healthcare systems and to the federal government all of which are passed along.

W.K. Zellmer

Cape Girardeau