On his June 13 show, Peter Boyles of 630 KHOW-AM again joined a guest in distorting provisions of stalled immigration reform legislation in the Senate. Boyles and Bob Dane of the anti-immigration Federation for American Immigration Reform falsely claimed that the measure doesn't require medical exams for immigrants, and they asserted that Democrats “blocked” an amendment that, in fact, had passed.
Boyles falsely claimed immigration bill doesn't require health check, lied about amendment
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published
On the June 13 broadcast of his 630 KHOW-AM show, Peter Boyles repeated the mischaracterization of proposed immigration reform legislation that “there's not one part of all of this” that requires a visa applicant “to get a health check.” Boyles and his guest, Bob Dane of the anti-immigration Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), also falsely asserted that "[Sen.] Ted Kennedy [D-MA] blocked" an amendment proposed by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) to facilitate criminal investigations of applicants denied the new “Z visa” that the legislation would create. In fact, the amendment the pair referred to passed 57-39 on June 6.
Boyles and Dane were discussing Senate legislation that had been introduced as Senate Bill 1348 and was being considered under an amendment that would substitute for the entire bill, Senate Amendment 1150. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) withdrew the entire bill from consideration on June 7.
From the June 13 broadcast of 630 KHOW-AM's The Peter Boyles Show:
DANE: But in effect this, this bill is, is back, because right now senators from both parties are working up a list of about 10 amendments that each side wants to introduce --
BOYLES: Yup.
DANE: -- and, and then that list gets sent to Harry, Harry Reid. Because remember, one of the major irritants for the Republicans has been that their amendments kept getting squashed by the Democratic leadership. In fact, Kennedy blocked attempts to call up amendments more than 12 times --
BOYLES: Sure.
DANE: -- over the course of the debate and they were cherry-picking which ones would go on the floor.
BOYLES: Well, yeah. They blocked the one where, where they were going to ask for a criminal investigations into people in the country that were rejected by a Z-1, -2, or -3 visa package. Ted Kennedy blocked that. And by the way, our --
DANE: Yeah, it was a Cornyn agreement.
The “blocked” amendment Boyles and Dane apparently were referring to was Senate Amendment 1250. However, Cornyn announced its passage in a press release published on his website June 7:
WASHINGTON -- U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee's Immigration, Refugees and Border Security subcommittee, succeeded this evening in closing a critical loophole in the proposed immigration bill. Sen. Cornyn's amendment, which would ensure that there are no restrictions on law enforcement's access to information filed by an alien who is denied the proposed “Z” visa status, passed the Senate by a wide margin of 57 to 39. This measure will help prevent some of the rampant document fraud that resulted from the 1986 amnesty bill.
Additionally, Boyles repeated the falsehood that the proposed legislation does not contain provisions for medical exams. He also referred to the case of Andrew Speaker, a U.S. citizen who crossed into the United States from Canada despite having been put on a no-fly list distributed to U.S. border guards because he was infected with a dangerous form of tuberculosis, or TB:
BOYLES: Yeah, our very own Senator Salazar -- Kenny Boy -- he voted with Ted. Now, why don't I have the right -- the better one is, all these stories with tuberculosis and there's now the national tuberculos-. When I looked at Bush-Kennedy -- and we got this guy here, Speaker, “TB Boy” -- there's not one part of all of this that says, “Oh, and by the way, before you get the Z-1, the Z-2, the Z-3 -- whatever the hell other cockamamie thing you got -- you got to get a health check.”
DANE: Not, not a, not a single medical exam --
BOYLES: Not one.
DANE: -- for people who for the most part have never had an immunization.
BOYLES: In their life.
DANE: In their life. We've been attempting to flesh out where the heck the, the Center for Disease Control's position on this is because in some sections of the country we have regressed epidemiologically back --
BOYLES: California.
DANE: -- to the early 1970s.
BOYLES: California.
As Colorado Media Matters has noted, S.A. 1150 requires a medical examination, “including a determination of immunization status,” for prospective nonimmigrant workers and for aliens applying for “earned adjustment” under the Z visa program. Further, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security already requires a tuberculosis check as part of the medical examination required for “aliens applying for adjustment of status.”
Moreover, contrary to Dane's suggestion that there is a need “to flesh out” the position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on medical examinations for prospective immigrants, the CDC maintains guidelines for medical examination of aliens seeking to enter the United States. First on the CDC's list of “Communicable Diseases of Public Health Significance” is tuberculosis. The CDC's “Technical Instructions for Medical Examination of Aliens” -- applicable to examinations of aliens applying for a visa when already in the United States and of those applying for admission from abroad -- list “infectious tuberculosis” first among communicable diseases for which an evaluating physician must test.