by David W. WebberEssays
Summary of U.S. Law on Entry of Noncitizens with HIV
The United States denies entry to noncitizens (both immigrants and non-immigrant visitors) with HIV. This law, which has been widely criticized by public health authorities (among others), is virtually unique among HIV travel policies world-wide, putting the United States in the company of countries such as Armenia, China, and Saudi Arabia.
Initially, the policy was adopted by the former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, now U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services within the Department of Homeland Security. Subsequently, however, the U.S. Congress put this exclusion into the Immigration and Nationality Act itself, Section 212(a)(1)(A)(i) [8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(1)(A)(i)]:
Any alien . . . who is determined (in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services) to have a communicable disease of public health significance, which shall include infection with the etiologic agent for acquired immune deficiency syndrome” is ineligible to receive a visa and ineligible to be admitted to the United States.
Reform of the law in this area will require another act of Congress to repeal the ban. For more information about this issue, see § 11.10 of AIDS and the Law.
The Legacy of Michael Nicolosi
The following article appeared originally in The Philadelphia Lawyer, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Winter 2004), the quarterly magazine of the Philadelphia Bar Association, and is reprinted with permission.
This year marked the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania. To explain how the AIDS Law Project came into being in 1988 requires describing two very different men. One of them you’ve probably never heard of; someone who, in a sense, was lost to history. The other is just the opposite.
Public interest lawyers everywhere are well acquainted with this kind of story. We know very well the difference between the powerful and the disfranchised, between those of authority, privilege and wealth, who nevertheless live in moral poverty, and those who are often economically poor, yet through strength of will evade the label of “victim” and the passivity and powerlessness implied by that label.