Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

by Dorothy Roberts

In September 2009, the United Kingdom Border Agency began a pilot program that uses DNA to check the nationality of asylum seekers. The Human Provenance Pilot Program verifies the nationality of people who said they had fled war-torn Somalia by asking them to submit to genetic screening. Immigration officials want to make sure the asylum seekers are not actually from another country, such as Kenya. Human rights advocates and scientists protested the program, pointing out that it conflated ancestry and nationality and ignored the possibility that people with origins in one country might have moved to another. British geneticist Sir Alec Jeffreys, who pioneered human DNA profiling, is one of the program’s chief critics, charging the Border Agency with “making huge and unwarranted assumptions about population structure in Africa.”