| Sumario: | Like their peers across western Europe, Australia and the Americas, large segments of the British public and a significant proportion of Britain's medical establishment have enthusiastically promoted medical screening (and de facto medical selection) of would-be migrants since World War II. Politically, such medicalised controls have been relatively uncontroversial both domestically and internationally, and across Europe have arguably provided 'objective' scientific cover for efforts in fact directed towards controlling the entry of migrants from specific ethnic groups and countries of origin. Targeted groups were, above all, those who were 'racialised': that is, those to whom the receiving nation ascribed homogenising racial identities predicated (implicitly or explicitly) on phenotypical or biological as well as cultural and behavioural differences.1 However, despite widespread enthusiasm for medical selection of migrants in Britain, the implementation of genuinely restrictive or exclusionary health controls on migration proved challenging.
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