Immigration and Health: Law and Regulation in Australia, 1958-2004

Abstract

This article, which completes a two-part review of immigration health screening in Australia,1 is a chronological review of the immigration health legislation in Australia since 1958, the year the Commonwealth passed the present Migration Act 1958 (Cwlth). Other legislation reviewed includes the Migration Regulations, the Quarantine Act 1 908 and Quarantine Regulations made thereunder, including the Quarantine Regulations 2000 (Cwlth). The review describes powers to detain and deport people with prescribed diseases listed under the legislation over time, and the health criteria applied by the Department of Immigration to applicants for different visa categories and from different countries. We detail the last ten years of government policy guidelines for medical practitioners applying the health criteria, and set out the medical tests to be administered to applicants in accordance with their country of origin and with the health standards required by applicants for different visa classes. Most nations have powers to regulate the entry of non-citizens on health grounds. The modern history of this regulation its connection to the very emergence of nations over the past two centuries has received considerable, and increasing, historical attention. This is particularly the case in recent histories of nationalism and public health in the United States (US).2 From the late nineteenth century, and thus often linked to a global wave of Chinese exclusion acts, health criteria for entrants were increasingly specified. Scholars have demonstrated how national population policies were implemented through health screening, which in this early period had clear race-based and eugenic rationales, usually, but not always, explicit. However, Amy Fairchild, writing comparatively of each US border (with Canada, with Mexico, and on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans), has argued that the famous Ellis Island procedures for health screening were more an induction into US industrial culture than a means for exclusion on health grounds. As Bashford has argued elsewhere, the immigration history of twentieth-century Australia, including the 'White Australia Policy', is closely connected with the history of Australian public health policy and practice.3