Reiter's Assumptions Don't Hold Up

In her February 16, 1993 editorial, Jendi B. Reiter writes that "the Administration should feel no shame about immigration laws that take into account the immigrant's potential to be a public health threat." The rest of her editorial is used to support this contention. There are, unfortunately, several serious errors in her logic.

Reiter devotes almost half of her editorial to an analogy: that of a family head deciding whether or not to take in a vagrant seeking shelter. After establishing that the family head does indeed have the prerogative to turn the vagrant away because of the intended or unintended harm he may cause the family, Reiter admonishes the Clinton Administration for reducing the list of medical conditions restricting immigration. Like the family head, the Administration should instead be turning away people with AIDS, syphilis, leprosy, and other diseases to protect the nation's citizenry.

Does the family analogy actually hold enough water to merit so much of Reiter's attention? Actually, it does not. A government--no matter what kind--has responsibilities and standards far different than a family. Unless the family head in Reiter's example owned some kind of homeless shelter, of course he could choose to exclude whomever he wanted from his home. This would be true even if the shelter-seeker was well-dressed, well-groomed, and carried no infections diseases of any kind. A government, though, is different--especially our government. Save our Native American friends, all of us are immigrants; and a great many of us are 20th century immigrants. United States immigration policy has (except for brief spurts of isolationism and nativism) always been inclusive--it has allowed others in except under a limited set of circumstances. A family, on the other hand, would ordinarily practice a policy of exclusion--to turn others away except in very rare circumstances. The family analogy, then, is quite a stretch.

Do carriers of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, then, pose such a risk to the citizenry that they should be on the list of excluded? Notwithstanding Reiter's almost laughable claims that "routine contact between [the carriers] and the uninfected community will certainly include sexual activity" and that "intravenous drugs may well become another regular medium of interaction," (italics mine) it is well established that casual contact between persons cannot facilitate the spread of the AIDS virus. In fact, if all unmarried couples just practiced abstention, the favorite Reagan-Bush prescription for the AIDS crisis, these immigrants would pose no problem whatsoever.

Reiter also attempts to use an overwhelming assumption to assist her argument when she urges Clinton Administration officials to make a "quick review" of the Declaration of Independence. There, she says, they would find it written that "the government is our creation for our needs, not an independent entity that should follow its own opinion in matters that affect us." Whether the Declaration can really be interpreted in this way is questionable, but it is unquestionable that the Constitution establishes a republic in which the people elect representatives to govern on their behalf. This does not imply the sort of telephone democracy we have seen recently in which representatives simply follow the whims of popular opinion. Often, leadership means leaders "following their own opinions in matters that affect us." At any rate, this is an age-old, ongoing debate in political philosophy; a resolution has yet to be reached, contrary to what Reiter would have us believe.

Along the way, Reiter also takes cheap shots at Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, whom she calls "a vocal advocate of campus speech codes," and to President Clinton, with reference to the "already battered iamge of our golden-boy president." Any detailed examination of Shalala's record as University of Wisconsin chancellor (not president) would show that far from being a "vocal advocate" of speech codes, she established such a code only very reluctantly after several racial incidents. And as for President Clinton, despite a run of incredibly bad publicity and, I concede, a shaky first few weeks, a CBS/New York Times poll of February 15 (presumably the day Reiter wrote her editorial), found him enjoying a healthy 53%-30% public approval-to-disapproval rating. In fact, if it's a battered image Reiter is searching for, perhaps she would do well to begin with the badly-beaten, rejected Republican Party. But as for the reversal in immigration policy effected by the Administration, it is the opinion of this reader that it was a long overdue policy shift consistent with our national values and past immigration standards. Jay Kim '95