Time Immortal

…but others have. And I’d like to comment briefly on that.

Background: John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, proposed in a radio interview recently that he was contemplating introducing legislation to prevent HIV-positive immigrants from being allowed to enter the country. Australia has seen an increase in HIV transmission in recent years, and is looking at methods to reduce the rate again.

Commentary on Howard’s remarks has, predictably, been a mixed bag.

Infectious diseases specialist Dr Chris Lemoh called it “a hysterical overreaction, it mixes racism with a phobia about infectious disease”, according to the Associated Press news agency.

“To not allow people to come on the basis of any health condition is immoral, it’s unethical and it’s impractical to enforce.”

Uh…Chris? No it’s not. Australia — and they’re not alone in the world in doing this — already prohibits persons infected with tuberculosis from entering the country. And I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be too thrilled if someone infected with smallpox showed up at the door asking to come in. And the thing is, there’s nothing wrong with that.

I realize that HIV and tuberculosis are different, and that tuberculosis, unlike AIDS, can be transmitted by aerosol methods. But that’s not the point of what I’m saying, dear Reader; the point is that it’s not immoral nor unethical to deny entry to a country on the basis of a health condition. Nations do it quite often, and for good reason.

And in fact, Canada and several other nations already have a policy like this in place.

Yusef Azard, from the National Aids Trust, said tighter controls on immigration would not necessarily have an effect on the rate of infection.”The United States has had these sorts of strict entry restrictions on HIV for many, many years,” he said.

“It’s got the highest rate of HIV in the developed world. So it doesn’t actually do any good. People go underground. Stigma and discrimination increases in the country and makes the response to HIV all the more difficult.”

Mr. Azard has a point in that simply imposing a ban on HIV-infected immigrants will not be enough to drastically reduce HIV transmission rates. To do that, one needs a more comprehensive approach to the problem that includes a number of domestic reforms — Uganda’s highly successful “ABC” program serves well as an example here — as well as a renewed sense not only of personal individual entitlement (the inevitable outcome of a rights-centric culture that strays too far from the (potentially unacknowledged, but nevertheless present) Christian basis for its rights legislation) but of personal responsibility to the larger society all around each individual.

But there are other reasons why countries do not want to let HIV-positive persons (or persons with other critical ailments) in as immigrants: cost. In what might just be a tragic irony, Canada serves as a not unreasonable example here, because our healthcare system is essentially a publicly-funded system. That means that the government pays the costs of most medical treatments that the people of the nation incur. Ultimately, it means that the people of the nation pay those costs, since the government’s chief source of revenue is (of course) taxes.

Whatever one’s opinions on the merits or problems inherent in such a system, the point is that immigrants who are infected with diseases like HIV will add to the burden of an already saturated healthcare system in a nation like Canada, because they will require treatment for their HIV, or their tuberculosis, or whatever else they are infected with. Most nations struggle to present their domestic populace with adequate health care without needing to import additional patients.

I realize that’s not a complete argument — as I have said, I haven’t yet formed a (complete) opinion on this proposed policy of Howard’s. On the surface of it, it sounds reasonable, but by the same token it is by no means a solution to the rise in HIV rates that Australia is attempting to deal with. Not a complete solution, at any rate.

But then, in the West’s promiscuous culture of entitlement, the complete solution is currently rather unlikely to occur.