WASHINGTON - President Obama said yesterday that the United States would overturn a 22-year-old travel and immigration ban against people with HIV early next year.
The order will be made final Monday, Obama said, completing a process begun during the Bush administration.
The United States has been among a dozen countries that bar entry to travelers with visas or anyone seeking a green card based on their HIV status.
"If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it," Obama said at the White House before signing a bill to extend the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program. Begun in 1990, the program provides medical care, medication, and support services to about half a million people, most of them low-income.
The bill is named for an Indiana teenager who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion at age 13. White went on to fight AIDS-related discrimination. He died in April 1990 at age 18.
His mother, Jeanne White-Ginder, attended the signing ceremony, as did several HIV/AIDS activists.
In 1987, at a time of widespread fear and ignorance about HIV, the Department of Health and Human Services added the disease to the list of communicable diseases that disqualified a person from entering the United States.
The department tried in 1991 to reverse its decision but was opposed by Congress, which went the other way two years later and made HIV infection the only medical condition explicitly listed under immigration law as grounds for inadmissibility to the United States.
The law effectively has kept out thousands of students, tourists, and refugees and has complicated the adoption of children with HIV. No major international AIDS conference has been held in the United States since 1993, because HIV-positive activists and researchers cannot enter the country.
Obama said that by lifting the ban, the United States would take a step toward ending the stigma against people with HIV/AIDS, something he said had stopped people from getting tested and had helped spread the disease.
