Migration, contagion and nation: Imaginaries of the border in the moral panic about HIV positive migrants in Britain, 1997

This dissertation critiques the entangled co-production of moral panic, common sense and the border as a geographical imaginary. It takes as its point of departure the attempt, in January 2014, of 18 Conservative MPs to amend the Immigration Bill so as to ban people with HIV from moving to Britain. According to their proposal, 'immigration permissions' would become dependent on a person's ability to 'demonstrate that they are not carriers of any . . . prescribed pathogens', namely Hepatitis B and HIV.1 Their move provoked shock and outrage in the political sphere and in civil society alike. Daisy Ellis, a representative of the Terrence Higgins Trust noted that, were the amendment to be passed, it 'would represent the most draconian policy enforced on people with HIV by this country to date.'2 The reaction to the amendment was thus founded in a sense of confusion and consternation - Ellis states that it was a shocking 'about-face' that 'would take UK HIV policy into an new Dark Age.' Amongst those opposed to the proposal, the general understanding was that this was a move in total contradiction to the political and popular consensus on HIV. The subsequent failure of the amendment only strengthened this narrative of a historical aberration.
This proposal, in contrast, operates under the conviction that this effort was anything but ahistorical, and anything but unpopular. The thesis here is that the 2014 amendment grew out of a moral panic that began at the end of the last century, and developed unchecked beyond the millennium, articulating itself through a particular imaginary of the border as a site of surveillance, quarantine and protection. This is a study whose historical arc can be traced back to a set of articles published in 1997, when the right-wing press began to cultivate public concern around HIV-positive migrants seeking 'expensive' treatments on the NHS. These initial efforts served to foster anxiety around the permeability of the border via the avatar of the accessibility of the NHS, fomenting a complex of concerns which would propagate over the next half-decade. By 2003, this complex had grown into a full-scale moral panic, with a concern about the costs of medical care metamorphosing into a fear of migrants transmitting HIV to the 'native' population. The permeability of the border now became manifest in the nation's vulnerability to contagion, a shift soon reflected in the political sphere, with
the Conservative party adopting policies on HIV and migration in the run-up to the 2005 general election. The importance of the border is implicit in Michael Howard's declaration that: 'We need to control who is coming to Britain to ensure that they are not a public health risk and to protect access to the NHS. It's plain common sense.'3 This transition from a limited concern about accessibility to a common sense about vulnerability, contagion and control, is what animates this study, for it forms the unacknowledged context and historical backstory to the 2014 amendment. So as to arrive at a critical understanding of the relation of moral panic to common sense, and common sense to geographical imaginary, this project attempts to answer the following research questions:
1. How was the moral panic first propagated in the late 1990's? How was the relation between access to the NHS and the 'weakness' of the border narrated? What drove this initial interest in HIV and migration?
2. In what ways was the moral panic reproduced in the early 2000s? When and where did a concern about accessibility become a panic about vulnerability? How did this panic push itself into political discourse, through its articulation as a geographical imaginary?
3. What were the ramifications of this moral panic? Did it manage to shape a new common sense? How has this common sense reshaped the contemporary conception of the border? Was this expressed in the actions of those 18 Conservative MPs?