Speech #1030012574

The standard AIDS test takes 48 hours to get the results back. Would you really ask international business travelers and tourists to sit in Kennedy Airport or Dulles or Los Angeles International for 48 hours while they go through London and Tokyo with no hassle? Would we intend to send refugees back to dictator governments just because the refugees are HIV infected? Surely I would hope no one is suggesting that there should be one policy to protect refugees from torture and execution for people who are HIV negative and another one for people who are HIV positive. What would we intend to do about people with HIV who are physically now in the United States? The truth is that we have a large number of people who are illegally in the United States. and that is not going to change because of the Senate amendment. To slow the AIDS epidemic in the United States. the public health people need to get information and education. counseling and testing. and in some cases preventive treatment for diseases like tuberculosis to those people. If we scare them away from public health clinics. we are doing no one a public health service. There are deeply held questions about healthcare costs. but there are questions about how best to deal with travel and public health and refugee policy. and there are issues of plain discrimination. We have said that public health decisions should be made by public health people. but now that both the Bush and the Clinton administration Secretaries of Health have recommended action. the other body has decided to overrule that. What I am asking Members to understand is how complicated these issues are and to give us the ability to work to address these complexities in a fair way. I would expect that we would have that opportunity in the conference. The instructions. which are not bindingbut I will interpret them to mean that this House wants us to address these questionsare instructions that would have us do Just that. and interpreted in that way I will vote for those instructions and urge my colleagues to vote for those instructions as well to give the conferees the signal that you want us to look at the issue and come up with a reasonable proposal on how to deal with this immigration matter. Mr. Speaker.