Where is the border? Screening for tuberculosis in the United Kingdom and Australia, 1950–2000

The modern history of the regulation of entry of non-citizens, and its connection to the emergence of nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is receiving increasing historical attention. This is particularly true of histories of nationalism and public health in North America and Australia. It has been argued that the immigration history of Australia in the twentieth century, for example, has strong links with public health policy and practice. Alison Bashford has been concerned to integrate the history of health and infectious disease control into the study of immigration and citizenship, seeing it as an element of the legal and technical constitution of ‘undesirable’ entrants. Part of the effect of joint infectious disease and immigration regulation over the twentieth century, she argues, has been the imagining, as well as the technical implementation, of the island-nation as ostensibly secure.1