"the people at Ellis Island we're not exactly Rockefellows."
You missed the point, I'm afraid. the subject was about social services. The immigrants of Ellis Island (some of my ancestors were) were tested for TB, and other communicable disesase. Many of them were sent back. They had to have a SPONSOR who agreed to care for them if they were unable to. We have TB on the border in spades now, and in the prisons, much of it the drug resistant kind. Oh, and they had to learn English.
Docs journal reports hospitals being closed, previously vanquished diseases being spread
* * * ...84 California hospitals are closing their doors as a direct result of the rising number of illegal aliens and their non-reimbursed tax on the system.
"Anchor babies," the author writes, "born to illegal aliens instantly qualify as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income and Disability Income."
In addition, the report says, "many illegal aliens harbor fatal diseases that American medicine fought and vanquished long ago, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, plague, polio, dengue, and Chagas disease." [snip]
Actually only 240,000 of the 20,000,000 who passed through Ellis Island were rejected, that's about 0.1%.
BTW, TB was rampant throughtout the country. There is a reason that there were sanitariums until the 1940's.