San Francisco Chronicle; Wednesday, August 5, 1998
Elaine Herscher, Chronicle Staff Writer

A weary Christopher Arnesen greeted a passel of lawyers and reporters at the U.S. Customs office after flying from his native country, risking detention in prison by immigration authorities.

"At this stage, I don't know if I'll be allowed to stay," Arnesen said. "But I was planning to come out of here in handcuffs."

Instead, Arnesen cleared a significant hurdle: He was allowed back into the United States despite a 1993 federal law forbidding HIV- positive foreigners from entering the country.

Now he must persuade the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to let him to stay long enough to fight for Social Security disability benefits he says he is entitled to now that he is ill.

From 1966 to 1994, the 56-year- old New Zealander lived in San Francisco as a permanent resident and paid Social Security taxes the same as any U.S. citizen.

A tour guide and photographer whose job took him all over the world, Arnesen was told he was out of the country too often to qualify for U.S. citizenship.

He says that when he became too sick to work in 1994, a Social Security Administration official told him he had to return to New Zealand and apply for benefits through the U.S. Embassy there.

But once he went back, Social Security refused to mail his $680 monthly benefit check to New Zealand because, U.S. officials say, that country has no reciprocal agreement to pay benefits to U.S. citizens permanently residing there.

Social Security requires beneficiaries to spend a month in the United States every six months, but Arnesen was prohibited from complying because he had HIV.

His plight revived an old and painful issue for people with AIDS. In the late 1980s and early '90s, immigration officials slammed the door on HIV-positive foreigners. Congress made it a law in 1993.

Yesterday, Arnesen risked detention and temporary confiscation of his life-saving AIDS drugs. Missing one or two doses of the complex mixture of drugs that many AIDS patients take can be fatal.

But Arnesen said that his encounter with immigration service officials turned out to be a congenial one and that he had been told to visit immigration officials again August 17 to determine how long he can stay in the country. Meanwhile, a team of attorneys working pro bono is filing for an immediate hearing in federal court concerning his benefits.

"He did everything right," said Kristen Jensen, one of his attorneys. "He paid his taxes better than some people who were born here."

Current law ranks HIV among the "loathsome and contagious diseases" that must be kept from entering the country, and Arnesen chose to get some lighthearted mileage from it.

He stepped out of Customs with a suitcase that bore the words, "Loathsome, Contagious & Proud."

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