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Comments: 515 +- Science: Scientists Decry "Horrifying" UK Border Test Plan on Wednesday September 30, @02:27AM
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by
kdawson
on Wednesday September 30, @02:27AM
from the genetic-papers-please dept.
from the genetic-papers-please dept.
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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."
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1984 (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't even funny anymore.
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 £$+*@
Parent
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.
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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.
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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.
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Re:Emigration is a Privilege, not a Right (Score:4, Insightful)
Only because the majority still believe in those things.
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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. )
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PR (Score:5, Insightful)
Aparently, simply discrimating by skin color is not cool anymore.
Re:PR (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure it is. They just want SCIENCE to take away all that awful guilt.
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Unheared of in history (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean like Franks, Saxons, Walloons/Welsh and Frisians all living in one country?
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Re:PR (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that it is my capital, and my home, yes.
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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?
Parent
Re:PR (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you also want the system like Canada where doctors end up working as janitors?
Note: I'm a Briton who emmigrated to Canada in 1996, and now hold a passport there. I returned to the UK a couple of months ago. I think you're wrong about immigration. Your comments are bigotted - this country needs a culture of acceptance, like Canada has.
Parent
Re:PR (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really a valid comparison, as Canada is the world's second biggest country, and could fit the population of Britian in several times over without even noticing, but Britain is way more accepting of immigration than Canada.
To move to Cananda, they require you speak English or French, preferably both, you generally need a degree, and a job. Or a lot of money. To move to the UK, you don't need anything other than directions to the welfare office. There's not much threat of being deported, it's very easy just to disappear.
Why don't you ask the primary school teachers who are seeing classes filled with kids who barely speak English, as to the benefits of unrestricted immigration. Never mind us accepting them, why don't immigrants to Britain accept us? Why don't they learn the language and secure employment before getting on the plain?
We have millions unemployed, we don't need any immigrants to work as janitors.
Parent
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.
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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?
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Re:PR (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you want to let that happen with your own capital?
54% of people in Washington DC are of African descent. 40% are of European descent. 9% Hispanic descent. 3% Asian descent.
We seem to be doing just fine.
Parent
Re:excuse me... (Score:5, Insightful)
100% of the people in Washington DC are of African descent.
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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.
Parent
Re:PR (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:PR (Score:4, Interesting)
You are failing to make the distinction between a state founded as an ethnic and national project, as many European and East Asian countries are, as opposed to countries that are not, e.g. Australia, United States, Canada.
While I am by no means a UKIP/BNP voter, I think that in any given country, the concerns of the ethnic majority, about having their way of life disrupted, and their culture diluted by people from poor countries who don't respect their hosts, is justified.
East Asia, by and large, are doing a very good job at avoiding cultural suicide, by severely restricting mass immigration from poor countries, or countries with lesser-developed cultures. Europe, OTOH, has failed, and with the ghettoization of its inner cities, has only recently woken up to that fact.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:PR (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing about letting in absolutely anyone is that it doesn't protect the benefits of exclusivity. It also doesn't reinforce the cultural and social preferences of those people a country belongs to.
With culture comes religious and political baggage. For example, Muslims tend to bring Islam with them when they arrive in a Western country. Religion is bad, primitive religion is worse, and there is every reason for Westerners who value personal freedom to keep out religious enemies just as they would reject political enemies (religion is merely superstitious politics).
It's a bit of a wrench when people raised on simplistic, very blind idealism find that other people can use their naive ideals against them. To the extent that you allow a population of social primitives into your home, they will make it over in the image of the societies they left, especially when their religion is predatory. People cherish the idea that their ideals will magically protect them (rather a secular religion IMO) but are coming up against reality.
Europe belongs to Europeans. They should decide if there is a moral obligation to turn it into Arabia and Africa, or not. I would think they suffered enough getting Christianity off their backs, but it appears Euros don't remember history any better than Yanks.
Parent
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
Parent
Re:PR (Score:5, Insightful)
Firstly, nationality is not the same as skin colour.
Nationality is not the same as DNA either.
Parent
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.
My DNA profile (Score:4, Funny)
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The problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The science is horrible, but the root of the problem is primarily political and perhaps moral.
Re: (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:The problem (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (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: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?
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Re:The problem (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (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:The problem (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:The problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The problem (Score:5, Interesting)
You've fallen for the line that there is some abstract entity called 'country' which can benefit from an influx of these so-called intelligent 'immigrants'.
When it comes to considering whether to allow immigration the question should be: does it benefit citizens IN THE LONG TERM. If the answer is no then they shouldn't be let in.
Let's look at the three main arguments for allow immigrants:
1) highly skilled.
Firstly, what's the chance that Bonga-Bonga land is going to produce anyone that's highly skilled? Secondly if they could, why would they come here? And thirdly if we need them INVEST IN OUR PEOPLE!
In fact you could argue that by letting them come here we're depriving their homeland of their expertise.
2) Immigrants will help pay the pensions
Immigrants get old as well. So all you do is push the problem back. And that assumes they don't just stick their snouts in the benefits trough.
3) Immigrants will do jobs that we (citizens) don't want to do.
Firstly, immigrants don't stick with doing the crappy under-paid jobs. Next generation they too will be declining to do them. So unless you're willing to make them a slave-race that isn't going to work for long. And supply and demand: increase wages to a level that attracts people who want those jobs, don't import foreigners.
There is literally no good reason for a rich country like the UK to allow immigration from the third world.
Parent
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.
Parent
DHS (Score:3, Insightful)
Soon to be in an airport near you...mandatory DNS sample of all visitors to this, thank God, free country.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
> mandatory DNS sample
DNA, of course. Your A-records are still safe :-)
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....
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.
Parent
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]
Parent
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.
Re:Doublethink. (Score:4, Informative)
Hussein was a communist
No, he was a ba'athist, which differs from communism in a few ways. It's basically a home-grown version of despotism that co-opts local tribalism to build the apparatus of repression.
-jcr
Parent
Imagine the outcry (Score:5, Insightful)
...if the country announcing such plans wasn't the UK, but Germany.
WTF (Score:4, Interesting)
What the fuck is going on over there?
Seriously, cameras in people's homes to make sure their kids are being "properly parented;" testing DNA at the border to determine ethnicity (and who knows what else, because what does race have to do with nationality these days)... Branding children as future criminals at age 5 based on hyperactive or normal anti-social kid behavior....and there's more that I can't even remember now.
England is becoming some nightmare 1984/Gattaca mashup...Brave New World indeed.
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.
Parent
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.
Parent