Why is health an important factor for any immigration policy?
For several reasons – one is that immigrants can bring disease into the UK and as a consequence, diseases which had been eradicted in the UK through a programme of vaccination – such as TB – are making a comeback simply through people immigrating here from third world countries with the disease. Immigrants need to be screened for infectious diseases. Another reason is that because the UK has a National Health Service which means that medical care is paid for from the public purse, we need to control the admission of people with diseases which will require a lot of expensive care (such as AIDS which costs the NHS billions a year through treating AIDs infected immigrants, particularly from Africa).
