The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) passed the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday by a vote of 303-115, practically ensuring that the statutory bar to entry into the United States for HIV-positive immigrants and foreign visitors will be lifted.

"In the next eight years, we simply cannot allow our policy toward international law and human rights be subsumed entirely under the War on Terror," Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh told a room full of human rights advocates last month.

"Immigration law is extremely complicated. The two most complicated areas of federal law are immigration law and habeas corpus law, even though the representation of individuals caught up in these systems of law is very inadequate," Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals said.

Congressman David Price, chair of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, yesterday told Congress that comprehensive immigration reform should be the top national security priority for the next presidential administration. The harsh enforcement-only methods of the Bush administration, he said, are not working.