Rights Advocates Question Motive, Need : AIDS-Screening Plan for INS Protested

Homosexual-rights activists and congressional leaders reacted sharply Tuesday to a Reagan Administration proposal that would, in effect, require AIDS screening of all new immigrants, saying that antibody testing for past exposure to the disease is unreliable, misused and “rapidly becoming a threat to our civil rights.”

“This is an attempt to divide our society into people who have the AIDS virus and those who don’t. It started with the military, and now it’s immigrants . . . but it won’t work,” said Dr. Neil Schram, chairman of the Los Angeles City-County AIDS Task Force. “These are token gestures.”

Schram and others commented in the wake of action taken by Health and Human Services Secretary Otis R. Bowen, disclosed Monday in The Times, that would add acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, to a list of conditions that can be cited by the Immigration and Naturalization Service as reasons to deny prospective immigrants permanent-resident status.

The proposal drew a barrage of criticism from homosexual-rights advocates, who are trying to determine whether to challenge the proposal legally if it does not comply with standards and procedures of immigration law that bar “aliens with psychopathic personalities, sexual deviation or mental defect.”

“This could be a mechanism by which the government seeks to enforce the exclusion of homosexuals under the antiquated ‘sexual perversion’ provision of the act,” said Thomas B. Stoddard, executive director of Lambda Legal Defense Fund, a New York-based legal organization.

“I suspect it wasn’t calculated, just extraordinarily misguided and foolish,” he added.

Similarly, Schram said: “It’s becoming clearer that the AIDS antibody test is rapidly becoming a threat to our civil rights as long as it is being misused in this way.”

And Jeff Levi, spokesman for the National Gay Rights Task Force, said: “It’s medically unjustified, totally impractical and reflects a disappointing arrogance about the origins of this epidemic. People with AIDS who are traveling tend to be Americans going to France for treatment, so there seems to be a tremendous irony there.”

Federal public health officials in Bowen’s department already have sharply criticized the plan. They question whether “the public-health gains will be worth it,” according to one Administration source.

Critics of the test in the past have argued that it should not be widely used as a diagnostic tool because it reveals only that a person has been exposed to the AIDS virus, not whether he has the disease, and because it frequently produces false positive results.

Concerns in Congress

Congressional leaders, meanwhile, said that they were calling for Bowen to give justification for the proposed change.

“Given the nature of AIDS--it is not casually transmitted--and the uncertainties about the significance of an antibody-positive result, I question the justification for and appropriateness of this proposal to use the test for AIDS to exclude individuals from becoming residents of the U.S.,” Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) said in a statement.

Cranston said that he will join Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) in a asking for a full report from Bowen on the usefulness of the test.

Waxman, who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce health and environment subcommittee, said: “I don’t understand how it is in our interest to set up these restrictions. I find it very peculiar, because there are more AIDS cases in the United States than there are in other countries.”

Waxman, a strong supporter of funds for AIDS research, on Monday sent Bowen a letter citing “doubts about the justification and usefulness of a proposal to require antibody testing.” He introduced legislation last year to repeal provisions of the act that give immigration officials the power to deport any alien who says he or she is a homosexual.

Attorney Questions Need

John Trasvina, legislative attorney for the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said: “Until such time as there is an established connection between immigration and AIDS, there is no basis for such required testing.”

The proposal will get a short review from the Office of Management and Budget and then will be offered for public comment for 60 days, as required by law. After that, it will be resubmitted to the OMB for final approval. It could be in effect by July 1, according to OMB spokesman Edwin Dale.

“What we will look at is whether the costs to society are greater than the benefits,” Dale said. “This one sounds like a yes-or-no rule to me, and if we clear it initially, we would probably clear it again.”

The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control had recorded 17,001 cases of AIDS in the United States as of Monday, and 8,801 deaths related to the disease. There is no known cure for the disease, which strikes mainly homosexuals and intravenous-drug users.

More than 500,000 people immigrate annually to the United States, and another 200,000 resident aliens apply for permanent-resident status, according to INS statistics.