UK Gov seeks ’scientific’ basis for nationality

Attempts to define race through science haven’t had an entirely positive press subsequent to the collapse of the Third Reich, but the Weird Science Department of the UK Government could well be skittering on that very patch of thin ice. Lord Triesman, the Prime minister’s Special Envoy for Returns, this week said that work on the “scientific and technical identification of nationality” will be “an important tool” to be used for the return of illegal immigrants to their countries of origin.

Triesman, a Foreign Office Minister, was given the Special Envoy for Returns role earlier this year. Part of the job involves persuading foreign governments to accept illegal immigrants the UK wants to send back, but the question of “identification of nationality” arises from a related aspect of the job - how do you identify and redocument an undocumented alien who won’t tell you where they came from, or who’s telling you lies about where they came from? It’s a messy job, and frankly we’re not convinced there’s a whole lot of point in anybody doing it.

Aspects of the UK immigration service machine are already, as it were, measuring head size. Some attempt has been made to apply data on size and age, and x-rays and dental records, to estimate the age of asylum seekers’ children. These efforts have not however been hugely successful, and nailing down nationality/race is a entirely different

Complete text linked below:

Source:
The Register