US: HIV Traveler Entry Ban Finally Lifted
Gay City News > US HIV Entry Ban Finally Lifted by Obama Administration Regulation
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https://teakdoor.com/images/smilies1/You_Rock_Emoticon.gif The 1984 reaction to the late Ryan White when he was a 12-year-old public school student in Indiana was of a piece with the ban, beginning three years later, on entry into the US by HIV-infected foreign visitors. US HIV Entry Ban Finally Lifted by Obama Administration Regulation
Published: Thursday, November 5, 2009 5:28 PM CST
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
More than 15 months after Congress repealed a 1993 law that required that HIV be included on a list of health conditions that prevents foreign visitors from entering the United States, the Obama administration on November 2 published a regulation that will finally remove it from the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) entry prohibitions.
Visitors with HIV were originally barred from traveling into the US when the Reagan administration promulgated a regulation in 1987. At the behest of anti-gay warrior Jesse Helms, the late Republican US senator from North Carolina who often attached pet ideological causes to important pieces of legislation, the ban on entry by HIV-positive foreigners was codified in law six years later.
The vote last year to remove HIV from the list of disqualifying conditions came as part of the renewal of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. The measure passed the House in April by a vote of 308–116, with the Senate following suit in an 80-16 vote in July 2008.
At that point, DHS stated it had begun work on revising its regulations to remove HIV, but by the end of the Bush administration it had succeeded only in streamlining the existing waiver process always available to some small number of HIV-positive visitors.
The action by the Obama administration finally completes the process initiated by last year’s congressional repeal.
In remarks during the October 30 signing ceremony for the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act of 2009, President Barack Obama nonetheless credited his predecessor with beginning the process of regulatory change.
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“My administration will publish a final rule that eliminates the travel ban effective just after the New Year,” the president said, referring to the 60-day waiting period required before the regulation published November 2 can become effective. “Congress and President Bush began this process last year, and they ought to be commended for it.”
With the late Ryan White’s mother, Jeanne White-Ginder, on hand, Obama said, “Twenty-two years ago, in a decision rooted in fear rather than fact, the United States instituted a travel ban on entry into the country for people living with HIV/AIDS. Now, we talk about reducing the stigma of this disease — yet we've treated a visitor living with it as a threat… If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it… It's a step that will encourage people to get tested and get treatment, it's a step that will keep families together, and it's a step that will save lives.”
White was a 12-year-old public school student in Kokomo, Indiana, living with HIV when he was expelled because of his infection. That injustice focused the nation’s attention on the irrational fear of HIV then gripping the nation. After his death in April 1990, the nation’s first comprehensive federal treatment response to the AIDS epidemic was named in his honor.
