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Scientists Decry "Horrifying" UK Border Test Plan
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."
This isn't even funny anymore.
Aparently, simply discrimating by skin color is not cool anymore.
They had a TV program last year when they did some genetic tests on people who considered themselves to be 100% English. I remember that out of 12 one had mitochondrial DNA that would have had his female line originating in Eastern Europe, one had Jewish ancestry and another Indian - and these were all people who did not know of any non-British relatives.
Add to that the millions of people who have known foreign ancestry but British citizenship and the whole idea becomes useless.
The problem isn't the scientific validity of the test; the problem is the idea that an emigrant's nationality should factor into whether they should be allowed residency.
The science is horrible, but the root of the problem is primarily political and perhaps moral.
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....
It's not far.
Isn't the out of Africa theory based on the situation where there is as much genetic diversity in people within Africa as there is worldwide? There is no "Arab" gene, and even if there were consider that Saddam was born only about 300 miles due south of his very european hero Joseph Stalin.
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.
You mean like Franks, Saxons, Walloons/Welsh and Frisians all living in one country?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
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.
100% of the people in Washington DC are of African descent.
...if the country announcing such plans wasn't the UK, but Germany.
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 £$+*@
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
...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. Funny how war, fear, and poverty can make xenophobes out of even the most enlightened cultures.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
We have 'lazy assholes living off the dole' who are British. I'm saying that we don't add immigrants to their number. How we resolve benefit fraud is not the topic of discussion.
That's fine, though. Please, do provide more insight into the topic below. I find poor reasoning and pointless insults very conducive to debate.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Only because the majority still believe in those things.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I know that Nazism did horrible things in the past and that (in theory) people of all races and nations are equal, but being always politically correct and not even trying to discuss issues like that makes them even worse.
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
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.