US remote health controls: the past and present of externalisation David Scott FitzGerald Measures to control asylum seekers’ entry to US territory during the COVID-19 pandemic refect a long history of remote border controls. Powerful States have pushed their border controls deep into the territories of other States, disproportionately afecting asylum seekers and ofen deliberately targeting them. Yet most remote controls pre-date the international refugee regime and the exceptions in restrictive immigration laws for people seeking sanctuary from violence and persecution. 1 Many remote controls that are used today to keep out asylum seekers – such as carrier sanctions, pre-clearance inspections, deployment of liaison ofcers in ports of embarkation, mandatory documentation issued abroad, and detention in liminal spaces at the edge of a State’s territory – were originally designed as health controls. Uncovering this history is important for at least three reasons. First, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, governments can use remote health controls as a pretext to deter and deport asylum seekers. Second, remote health controls have a long history of being used as tools of ethnic and class selection. Third, the public acceptance and incorporation into the law of measures to ostensibly protect public health make it difcult for asylum advocates to efectively challenge remote control policies. Roots of US policy In the late nineteenth century, the US federal government stripped individual states like New York of the authority over health controls for arriving immigrants. The Act of 3rd March 1891 banned the admission of foreigners “sufering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease” and mandated the health inspection of all foreigners arriving at US ports of entry. Over the following 35 years, the government put in place a system of remote control built on fve components: penalising private transportation companies that carried diseased passengers; stationing US inspectors abroad to conduct screenings at ports of origin; using neighbouring countries as bufer States to screen transit migrants; detaining migrants in quarantine spaces at the territory’s edge (under a legal fction that they had not entered the State’s territory);