Scientists Decry "Horrifying" UK Border Test Plan 515
cremeglace writes "Scientists are dismayed and outraged at a new project by the UK border agency to test DNA, hair, and nails to determine the nationality of asylum seekers and help decide if they can enter the UK. 'Horrifying,' 'naive,' and 'flawed' are among the words geneticists and isotope specialists have used to describe the 'Human Provenance pilot project.' The methods being used to determine ancestry include fingerprinting of mitochondrial DNA and isotope analysis of hair and nails. ScienceInsider blog notes that it is 'not clear who is conducting the DNA and isotope analyses for the Border Agency,' and that the agency has not 'cited any scientific papers that validate its DNA and isotope methods.' There is also a followup post with more information on the tests that are being used, and some reactions from experts in genetic forensic analysis. This story was first reported in The Observer on Sunday."
1984 (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't even funny anymore.
PR (Score:5, Insightful)
Aparently, simply discrimating by skin color is not cool anymore.
What is this hoping to achieve (Score:5, Insightful)
Add to that the millions of people who have known foreign ancestry but British citizenship and the whole idea becomes useless.
The problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The science is horrible, but the root of the problem is primarily political and perhaps moral.
Re:PR (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure it is. They just want SCIENCE to take away all that awful guilt.
It has to go this way (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The problem (Score:3, Insightful)
And the rule should be a simple one: if you are an EU national you are allowed residency in the UK, otherwise not.
We also need to cancel these stupid loopholes that allow nationals of ex-Imperial colonies any preferential right of abode. The British Empire ended over 50 years ago!
Re:PR (Score:1, Insightful)
DHS (Score:3, Insightful)
Soon to be in an airport near you...mandatory DNS sample of all visitors to this, thank God, free country.
Antithesis of an empire? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that Britain has finally become the true antithesis of an Empire: rather than trying to expand, it wants to shrink and implode upon itself....
Gattaca (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't the out of Africa theory based on ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Security theatre snake oil strikes again in a fairly nasty and devisive way. You might as well screen people by height or just admit the predjudice and screen for skin colour because many people from Pakistan and India look like exactly like many dark haired europeans with a deep tan.
Somebody is in it for the money and is playing off people's predjudices to get it.
Unheared of in history (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean like Franks, Saxons, Walloons/Welsh and Frisians all living in one country?
Re:PR (Score:5, Insightful)
Firstly, nationality is not the same as skin colour.
Nationality is not the same as DNA either.
Re:PR (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that it is my capital, and my home, yes.
Re:The problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Why?
OK, we've got a political treaty with the EU, but if you were starting from scratch, why pick on any one country and give its people more favourable status than any others?
Re:The problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless I'm misreading this, the purpose of this test is to see whether someone's stated nationality matches what they say it is. When you're assessing an asylum claim, that does actually make sense - if they're lying about their nationality, they may well be lying about any of their reasons for claiming asylum.
Unfortunately, this test doesn't give you that. It's just not accurate enough.
Re:It has to go this way (Score:5, Insightful)
It has to go this way for V to eventually be able to come and free us!
It shows how unfaithful the movie was to the spirit and political ideals of alan moore's comic, that the message you received is to wait for some superhero to come and free you.
Re:PR (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, you may as well just said..
The population of London is expected to drop below 50% White by 2012. Would you want to let that happen with your own capital?
Do you vote BNP/UKIP by any chance?
Re:PR (Score:5, Insightful)
The population of London is expected to drop below 50% English by 2012.
From what I can see from a quick wiki of the last census, more than two thirds of the population of London is British born, and quite a few of the foreigners are from British families that emigrated and then moved back.
Would you want to let that happen with your own capital?
Assuming your premise is right, yes, I would let that happen to both the city I live in and the capital of my country. But these tests have nothing to do with 'Britishness' - they are about genetics and poorly-formed pseudo-scientific analysis. If you want to define Britishness go ahead and give it a try, but we're less ethnically pure than pretty much anyone, so that's a no go.
For example, I'm British, and there is no one that would contest that (well, very few). However, my ethnic heritage back to my grandparents is one quarter white British, one quarter white German, and one half European Jew. Additionally, I can parle un petit peu Francais, sprechen Deutsch, and make stabs in the dark in Spanish and Italian. My area is fairly white, for London, but the main types of takeaway / restaurant nearby are focused on Chinese, Thai, Indian, and American cuisine. This is not a country where ideas of purity work well.
Re:PR (Score:5, Insightful)
What I would really like to do is to is to expel anyone who cares from the country.
Also, you do realise that that is precisely the reason that most people like London?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:excuse me... (Score:5, Insightful)
100% of the people in Washington DC are of African descent.
Re:PR (Score:5, Insightful)
Aparently, simply discrimating by skin color is not cool anymore.
It's not about discrimination based on race, it's about verifying whether someone is from where they say they are from to prevent normal emmigrants passing themselves off as refugees to bypass the emmigration system. It's stupid of course because it's based on the assumption that there is a tie between nationality and genetic ancestry. A fairly large proportion of british citizens would test as Indian under this scheme.
Heard of HIV, genius? (Score:1, Insightful)
I suppose the high rate of poverty, AIDS, drug crimes and murder are in no way related to the mix either.
You are so enlightened!
Re:The problem (Score:5, Insightful)
For what reasons do you think this should be so?
My next door neighbour is Albanian. She has a degree in electrical engineering, and speaks four languages fluently (her native Albanian, of course, as well as English, Italian and German). She is precisely the sort of person we should be biting our own arms off to get into the country.
But she describes the whole experience of the immigration process as "Kafkaesque". She would have gone to Canada where people with her qualifications are welcomed - except she was engaged to marry my neighbour. The UK Embassy treated her as sub-human, with little manners, and tried to make the entire process humiliating.
What I have to ask is this: what is fundamentally different between, say, someone from Yorkshire moving to Hampshire, and someone from Albania - who speaks English fluently - doing the same thing? Why don't we have immigration controls in every county to keep people in the same place and stop them from moving around? Also, why do so many UK citizens want to emigrate to sunny places without bothering to learn the local language, but get bent all out of shape when people from other countries arrive in the UK?
Re:The problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The science is a problem because it's completely bogus. You can't tell what country a person is from this way; you can only tell generalities, such as what region they've been living in the last year, or what their ancestry is. It's pseudo-science.
My guess is that someone in the home office is an idiot (more so than usual), and has seen some abstract of some papers, decided that the techniques could be used for certain purposes, and then told someone about the plans without actually verifying the plausibility.
Racism under cover of science (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Antithesis of an empire? (Score:3, Insightful)
Immigrants are just the latest scapegoats. It's sad to say but we seem to have an unfortunate tendency to want to hate minorities and blame them for all our ills.
I think a lot of it is due not never having any kind of revolutionary moment where we realised the dangers of this kind of thinking and came to understand the value of things like freedom and equality.
Imagine the outcry (Score:5, Insightful)
...if the country announcing such plans wasn't the UK, but Germany.
Re:PR (Score:1, Insightful)
Hell yes and its nothing to do with race - Its London Its a shit hole and it sucks more than its fair share of resources out of the regions than its worth simply because its the capital.
Blow the Thames flood gates and let the place rot.
Independence for the North!
Emigration is a Privilege, not a Right (Score:2, Insightful)
Should the authorities simply look the other way and allow GB to be flooded with illegal aliens who refuse to assimilate into British society?
The answer is, of course, "no". The electorate in both France and Germany said, "no", when voters elected pro-Western politicians to run the government.
Let's be clear on this matter. Uncontrolled immigration wrecks a society. France now has large ghettos of Middle Easterners and Africans who refuse to assimilate into French society. They should be deported.
At this point, someone will cry, "racism". The correct rebuttal is to highlight the French of East-Asian ancestry. They readily assimilate and do not pose a problem for the French. In much the same way, Americans of East-Asian ancestry have assimilated and contributed significantly to American society. During World War II, Japanese-Americans volunteered to fight against both German and Japan -- yes, Japan. The 442 battalion of Nissei was the most decorated battalion in the U. S. Army. The Nissei showed their valor when they rescued a group of American soldiers who had been trapped in the Battle of the Bulge.
Every nation in Europe has the right (1) to determine who can enter a European country and (2) to favor some immigrants over others. I applaud the British government for its recent tough stance against uncontrolled immigration from Africa and the Middle East.
Re:Emigration is a Privilege, not a Right (Score:5, Insightful)
There will be huge problems with the technical side, massive incompetence by the people charged with operating the system, and large numbers of people who have trivial "skeletons in the cupboard" will fall foul of the system. (eg "your daddy aint your daddy, but your daddy dont know" to quote the old song, people trying to escape abuse, warlords, crime syndicates, or whos distant ancestors were rape victims being asked to explain things which their parents know nothing.)
And, as we all know, any information gathered by the UK government is normally in the hands of random Indians, Nigerians and Russians, etc within days, and the information on database so corrupt as to be worthless in less than a year. (According to official data, about 30% of data on the police national computer system is just plain wrong - but nobody has the authority to delete it.)
This is what it looks like, a crazed Orwellian government, who have lost touch with reality, hell-bent on absurd control-freakery.
PS enquiries at your Local Hackney pub will reveal a contact who can bypass the system for a large number of used fivers in a Safeway bag. ... [no carrier]
Just ask for £$+*@
Re:Antithesis of an empire? (Score:4, Insightful)
Refugee's are supposed to goto the nearest safe country but because of Britain's great welfare scheme many are traveling all across Europe and then sneaking into the UK. The majority of these refugees are men who are escaping the horrors at home but feel its ok to leave mums, wives and children back home.
A great strain is put on the local services like medical care, housing, schools. They then make no effort to integrate and form their own mini versions of their country within a town/city. Local's get upset because crime increases in these area's and because of their status the asylum seekers are given preferential treatment.
Do I agree with this measure? No I think its sick and wrong, but then I'm tired of the large number of fake asylum seekers we let in who I'm not aloud to complain about because its racist. Government caused this problem in the name of multi-cultralisim and the fact none of the non-minority population can complain is whats caused the strong racist feelings within the country, hopefully it will only take a couple of BNP MP's for Parliament to realise this before the country explodes.
So why not save millions in gov't budget... (Score:4, Insightful)
...and write a policy that says, "Wogs, go home"?
Seriously, it amounts to the same thing, but it eliminates all the funds that would be spent on all of these DNA tests. Because after all, if the accident of someone's birth is enough to determine their worthiness for British society, why not just do it on sight? "Get lost, coon!" It'll save a fortune.
P.S. Sure, a bunch of American Japanese did fight in the U.S. Army against Japan in World War II. The alternative, of course, was internment camp. [wikipedia.org] Funny how war, fear, and poverty can make xenophobes out of even the most enlightened cultures.
Re:Antithesis of an empire? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not wanting them in your home is not the same as hating them.
I don't hate you but I wouldn't invite you into my house.
Re:Emigration is a Privilege, not a Right (Score:5, Insightful)
While you will find some egregious examples where the First World truly exploited the Third, your arguments implicitly rely on a false assumption. You assume that
"Some person/country's wealth is predominantly the result of some other person/country's poverty" or simplified "The sum of all wins is equal to the sum of all losses"
This is the definition of a zero-sum game, like a sports tournament.
But trade is no zero-sum game, not even close. Trade ideally is a win:win-situation.
Dept of no surprise (Score:2, Insightful)
Where did this idea originate? (Score:1, Insightful)
In a land far away, some sleazy corporate lobbyist slithers up to a sleazy corrupt lawmaker, saying:
'Look guv, you got this problem with all them dirty immigrants, right? 'n the Daily Hate is on your back. 'n you've got an election loomin'. Well, mate, it's your lucky day. My company has got this infallible way of identifying where all these creepy immigrants come from. Once that's done yer can ship 'em back from where they comes from, like. We'll sort this problem for yer. Mind you, it's expensive, know what I mean! It'll cost yer, but yer can pass in on to the suckers who pays yer wages. Sweet ain't it. Life sure is sweet on the right side of the fence (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) Know wot I mean, guv!?
Re:The problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:leftist (Score:4, Insightful)
That's fine, though. Please, do provide more insight into the topic below. I find poor reasoning and pointless insults very conducive to debate.
Re:Emigration is a Privilege, not a Right (Score:3, Insightful)
And that has what to do with mitochondrial DNA?
Re:Emigration is a Privilege, not a Right (Score:3, Insightful)
So these immigrants stay young for ever? It's just putting off the problem.
When all the chavs who chose the dole as a career have been forcibly got off their arses and there are still unfilled vacancies then get back to me.
Re:Emigration is a Privilege, not a Right (Score:4, Insightful)
Only because the majority still believe in those things.
Re:Antithesis of an empire? (Score:5, Insightful)
2) You appear to read too much of the Daily Mail. The official figures for asylum seekers as as follows :
Total applications for asylum Q2 2009 = 6,045.
Total people refused asylum in Q2 2009 = 4154.
So assuming that the figures are average for the whole year, you are only looking at a total of 7564 successful asylum seekers PER YEAR ! Hardly flooding the country.
Also, the population of the UK in mid 2008 was around 61,383,000. That's 8.5 million less than you quoted. It would take over 1100 years for the "influx" of successful asylum seekers to make up the error in your figures. More people pass through Heathrow in a year (68 million) than actually live in the country. 7564 staying on is hardly significant.
Maybe the problem is the same as always - divide and rule, and you're falling for it.
Figures gained from the ICAR site [icar.org.uk] referencing the official Home Office quarterly report [homeoffice.gov.uk].
Population figures from the National Statistics site [statistics.gov.uk].
Heathrow figures from the BBC. [bbc.co.uk]
Re:PR (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Emigration is a Privilege, not a Right (Score:2, Insightful)
The UK has NO immigration problem. It's a freakin' ISLAND. It actually needs MORE immigrants as it is loosing population due to low birth rates and an aging population. Unfortunately it is also quite RACIST leading to stupid jingoistic policies like these to appease the football worshiping bigots.
Rubbish, it has a huge immigration problem. Anyone can request asylum and get housed and fed by the state. Why would armies of people be queuing up in France if the UK doesn't treat these people better than the rest of Europe?
That's not to say working immigrants are not very welcome, it's the ones who want to be supported that increase the burden on the rest of the working population.
Re:PR (Score:3, Insightful)
...or try a certain Elizabeth Windsor 1/4 German married to a Greek with Scandanavian Ancestry and she has close relatives from nearly every European country .....
Re:PR (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell yes.
As someone who has lived in London, and still spends 5 days a week there at work, a big part of the environment that draws people here is the mixture of different cultures, and the way they blend together into new things.
Re:The problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed sir (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't care about other people's nation or the colour of their skin. I do care about the culture they bring with them. And I do think that culture in Europe should remain predominantly European. This means either assimilating other cultures (people representing them living in Europe), or limiting amount of other cultures (people representing them) we import, or both.
I don't condone 1984-ish measures like described in this story, but I do think there should be limits to immigration, and I think toleration can go too far.
--Coder
Re:1984 (Score:5, Insightful)
You didn't build this country, and as you're very unlikely to be old enough to have actively participated in the wars, empire or any period when this sceptred isle was ( questionably ) glorious, you're actively blaming others for your own lack of success, whilst triumphing and extrapolating your smallmindedness to others who do not agree.
Anecdotal evidence for your argument; -1.
( And apologies for feeding trolls. )
Re:Emigration is a Privilege, not a Right (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah yes, it's the "nations have a right to decide who can enter" argument. Last time I looked, nations weren't sentient. They're made up of people. Your evidence that everyone in the UK supports these plans?
I'm a British citizen, and I disagree with such plans.
Hey, Free Energy! (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Dig up George Orwell from his grave.
2. Hook him up to a generator.
3. Watch him spin! (Wheeee!)
4. Profit!
Ancestry has nothing to do with nationality. (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if you made the ludicrous assumption that they could consistently and accurately get meaningful results from the test (I wouldn't have that much faith in a government lab associated with the immigration office), there's the fundamental logical problem: your genes (physical composition) haven't much relation to your nationality.
A lot of American citizens came from somewhere else. Israel will accept anyone that can properly document their jewishness (honestly, I have no idea what their criteria are) as a citizen.
UK immigration rules are based on nationality, which is a mutable trait (I can change it, at will, with a certain amount of effort). Isotopic measures probably relate more to occupation than "origin", and your genetic history is an independent variable. My kids have dual nationalities, and if my wife and I adopted a child from abroad, it could have 3 or more. How would the genetic test effectively identify the provenance (in legal terms) of the child. A US citizen could easily be genetically tied to any country on the planet and be no less a US citizen than someone in Chicago.
Re:Emigration is a Privilege, not a Right (Score:3, Insightful)
Britain has a serious problem with over population
By what metric is a country "overpopulated"? The idea that the UK has a high population density in contrast to other nations is ridiculous - check List of countries and dependencies by population density [wikipedia.org], the United Kingdom is way down the list at 52nd, just behind Vietnam. Nobody ever says Vietnam is overpopulated, so by what reasoning could the UK be said to be overpopulated?
Re:Define Europe (Score:3, Insightful)
However, I'm mostly talking about culture here. I am aware the subject matter is fuzzy and changing. However I don't think things like sharia law or non-secular society will ever be acceptable anywhere in Europe. There are certain values that must be preserved- like freedom of speech, secularism, democracy, free-thinking, individualism, value of life.
Your argument that borders are fuzzy and changing is something like arguing that a gradient image with black on top and white in the bottom is all the same colour. It isn't, it's white on the top, and black on the bottom and gray in the middle. There is no well defined border, but that doesn't mean that white and black are same colours.
--Coder
Re:Emigration is a Privilege, not a Right (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand your hint at socialism, for which socialists usually claim it was just implemented wrongly, when a few million people died in the Gulag, from hunger or simply disappeared by the thousands.
Yet I can easily imagine a hundred real-world examples of a win:win trade scenario, but not a single form of socialism that is not totalitarian and oppressive.
Trade and liberty always restrict their scope, leaving decisions beyond a certain point up to the people directly involved. You can easily limit, divide, partition or escape liberty. No matter how foolish it could be, I could always join an oppressive cult or quit my job. Or just lie flat on the beach.
But you can never have only a little bit of socialism and still escape from it once it's established. Socialism never limits it's scope, no problem is "their problem", no decision is "their choice".
You cannot implement this properly without a country-sized prison. I was on the wrong side of the Berlin wall before it came down, I know a bit about it.
Re:Emigration is a Privilege, not a Right (Score:4, Insightful)
You are going to have a long fucking wait. There are now, and always have been, plenty of the jobs that immigrants go for. Good fucking luck getting our home-grown underclass to take them.
This is a problem that's caused by your social welfare system. We have the same problem here in the USA, to a lesser extent. By giving these lazy "home-grown" people a way to avoid work they'd rather not do, they simply don't do it. Why clean toilets for a living when you can just collect a check from the government for sitting on your ass and watching TV?
The answer isn't to bring in a bunch of desperate immigrants to do the "jobs that no one else will do". The immigrants need to stay in their own countries, in their own cultures, and fix their own problems (with help of course), instead of just running away and leaving their countrymen to rot. Instead, we need to get rid of these idiotic social welfare programs, and let these lazy bums starve. When they get hungry enough, they'll start cleaning toilets or whatever they have to do to survive. Some government programs to help poor people find jobs would be useful (a lot of jobs are in places not close to where the poor people live, so they may need to be relocated, like for farming jobs), but a check for doing nothing just perpetuates the problem.