By Bob Roehr
The U.S. HIV travel and immigration ban was officially lifted on Jan. 4, 22 years after first going into effect. South Korea also lifted its HIV ban on the same day, leaving only a handful of authoritarian countries that still use HIV status as a factor in controlling who crosses their borders.
Jesse Helms, the late reactionary Senator from North Carolina, had championed the ban. In 1987 he pushed for a regulation imposing the ban, then in 1993 convinced Congress to codify it into law. It was the only disease specifically named within the immigration statute as reason for denial of entry.
HIV-positive individuals could obtain a special waiver to visit the U.S. and many did. But others declined to do so out of fear of discrimination within their own country if their status became known.
The successful push to eliminate the travel ban was part of reauthorization of PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which Congress passed in the summer of 2008. The Bush administration supported that removal.
That administration began the lengthy and tedious process to change regulations required under the ban. The Obama administration continued steps in that process.
Last month the International AIDS Society announced that it would bring the XIX International AIDS Conference to Washington, DC in July 2012. It had last held the biennial meeting in the U.S. in San Francisco in 1990, but subsequently boycotted a return to the U.S. because of the travel ban.
Immigration Equality spokesman Steve Ralls said they anticipate that the first HIV-positive persons to enter the U.S. after the ban has been lifted will be the Dutch couple Clemens Ruland, 45, and Hugo Bausch, 50, who are scheduled to land at JFK airport in New York on the afternoon of Jan. 7.
Ruland won an essay contest sponsored by an AIDS organization in the Netherlands for their clients, with a trip to New York as the prize. Ralls acknowledged that selection of the pair as "the first" is "pretty arbitrary," but he said hundreds of persons had contacted Immigration Equality about the pending changes in U.S. policy and Ruland and Bausch are the first of that group to hit these shores.
"This policy, in place for more than two decades, was unnecessary, ineffective, and lacked a public health justification," said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). "A sad chapter in our nation's response to people with HIV and AIDS has finally come to a close, and we are a better nation for it."
