Abstract
In this Comment, I examine the ways the United States has managed its borders and population through health-based exclusions that often serve as a proxy for race-based exclusions. I look specifically at how two sexually-transmitted infections (STIs)—syphilis and gonorrhea—became and remain grounds for inadmissibility. Since 1891, certain noncitizens entering the U.S. must be screened for these two STIs, yet both infections are detectable, treatable, and prevalent in the United States. Through analysis of the laws and policies that govern inadmissibility, I show how mandatory screening for STIs is a product of fear-based disease narratives and racist calculations of risk, with origins in more explicitly racist forms of health control, particularly sexual health control, at the U.S. border. I investigate how the premise of border health security relies on racial, gendered, and geographic othering, where sexual health in particular becomes a site of intervention for the U.S. government to manage threats to whiteness. Ultimately, after overviewing the impacts of mandatory STI screening, I conclude that STIs must be removed from inadmissibility grounds.
About the Author
Steffi Colao is a Promise Institute Fellow at Project ANAR (Afghan Network for Advocacy and Resources), where she works in asylum law and advocacy. She will join The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights for the Critical Legal Training in Border Justice Program during summer 2024. Steffi worked with several immigration and human rights organizations to challenge the way the U.S. government invokes national security to block migration. She holds a J.D. in Critical Race Studies and International & Comparative Law from UCLA School of Law, 2023, and a B.A. in Geography from Dartmouth College, 2019.
I am extremely grateful to Emmanuel Mauléon for his thoughtful and nuanced suggestions throughout advising this Comment, as well as to Hiroshi Motomura for his recommendations in developing the piece. I also offer my deepest appreciation to the UCLA Law Review, for their heroic revisions and for giving this Comment its home, and to Brett Davidson for being such an insightful, incredible editor. Many thanks to Richard Wright and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, who helped me with the historical and legal foundation. As always, thank you to tish lopez. This Comment would not exist without her mentorship, her astute guidance, or her care.
