The $30 million will offer needed support for AZT. and other more promising drugs which hopefully will become available in the coming months. However. this report is seriously flawed in one important area. During Senate consideration. the senior Senator from North Carolina threatened to block the $30 million for AIDS drugs unless an amendment were added to exclude immigrants who are HIV seropositive. And. this is how this amendment entered the bill. The language is no more explicit than-"excluding immigrants from the United States." It is my reading of that language that it applies to those who will be seeking entry into the United States. It is only such people who can be excluded. Those who are already within our borders without citizenship statusdocumented or undocumentedwould not. by definition. be covered by this provision. That is in essence the position that the AMA has recently adopted. It is the only position that makes any sense. Otherwise we would be forcibly ejecting seropositive undocumented immigrants who might be seeking to become citizens under the amnesty legislation adopted last year. There are already indications tht the amnesty program is not moving forward the way it should. The addition of mandatory testing for the AIDS virus would likely dissuade many such immigrants from coming forward. The ironic thing is that any immigrant. who is already here. who is seropositive. probably got infected in the United States. We must look to sound public health judgment and forge health policy which has the greatest chance of stemming the international AIDS epidemic. We must not engage in the pretense that we can seal our borders and stop this epidemic.
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undocumented immigrants undocumentedwould immigrant