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Comment by hello_friendos | Hacker News Reader

I think damaging families is the point of this policy.

Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and following them here? They include:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

We're trying to avoid flamewars on Hacker News, because they're predictable, therefore uninteresting, therefore off topic (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Plus they bring out meanness and dumbness in people and get worse as they go along.

It's to prevent "Child Recycling" which is trafficking children across the border to claim asylum then trafficking them back to accompany a new group of migrants.

read the comment you replied to again.

hint: it won't be effective at that.

Do you think that actually happens.

It's been my experience that anything that can be conceived of does or will actually happen but I'd be surprised if this were a common occurrence.

On the other hand, we are talking about desperate people frequently traveling under the guidance of notoriously callous border traffickers so what do I know...

I have no data, but I'd wager it's way more common to see any of the following: adoption, people raised by non-blood relatives, paternity not being what was thought -- all while being innocent, law abiding people.

> From October 2017 to February 2018, there was a 315 percent increase in the number of cases of adults with minors fraudulently posing as “family units” to gain entry.

So does that mean it was 5 cases and now it’s 21?

You don't need DNA or familial tracking for that. A biometric would do, since that would catch the child traveling under two different identities.

Of course, with DNA testing you could catch them the first time around, rather than have to wait for a biometric read on the second (or third) trafficking.

Or establish without a doubt that someone cheated or was adopted. The biometric is far less intrusive and damaging.

No, it’s to drive public money to the charlatans selling the tests, without any regard for perceived or actual threat to public safety.

This is going to cause harm, it will not accomplish its purpose, and the charlatans will be laughing all the way to the bank.

The point of this policy is to identify real familial relations with those crossing the border.

At the border there are instances of individuals using children to get special preference. The proposed idea will mitigate this issue.

This makes a lot of presumptuous about the intention of the adults here. Do you know that these are not something similar to adoptive parents?!

Can you define "real familial relations" purely by DNA? I don't think so, what about adoptions or surrogates?

This just seems like a policy that can be used to discriminate against people who don't fit a chosen definition of "family".

Or it can be used to expedite the clearance of real families instead of subjecting everyone to the same questioning methods.

> real families

That's... still discriminating against people who don't fit a chosen definition of "family"

But then they won’t be claiming “this is my daughter/son”...

They’re trying to filter against bogus claims.

And people with adoptive children will say what, exactly?

Presumably they can provide papers to the effect. Just as if I were to claim asylum in any other place.

Also, I’m sure they have rates of these things and if it starts getting higher than the norm it could prompt more scrutiny.

People fleeing for their lives may not have access to paperwork. In fact, the authorities denying people access to paperwork- such as birth records and legal status- is almost certainly evidence for approving an asylum claim in the first place.

Do you think the instances “fleeing” is the bulk of the cases? Mostly it’s economic migrants. We know if they were fleeing they could just stay in Mexico or if not from The Americas, in a neighboring country.

Also, in many of those countries there isn’t a tradition of adoption, so that would be pretty rare.

It's not that uncommon.

> Many of the migrants are asylum seekers fleeing political violence in their countries of origin, especially Congo and Cameroon. Many of the Congolese lived for years in Angola, where they learned enough Portuguese to get by in Spanish. Angola last year expelled more than 300,000 Congolese refugees.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/hundreds-o...

Angola is one of the up and coming countries in Africa. That people are leaving it indicates it’s more an economic calculus than persecution.

> The destruction in Kapende, where no house remains occupied or intact, marked the culmination of three days of violence in Lucapa, a sprawling mining town in the northeast surrounded by some of the world’s richest diamond fields.

> About 300,000 Congolese have fled Angola in the last few weeks, many of them in response to the violence in Lucapa at the beginning of October.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-angola-drc-violence-insig...

> Angola is one of the up and coming countries in Africa. That people are leaving it indicates it’s more an economic calculus than persecution

The US was the up-and-coming nation of the Western hemisphere for a long time while engaging in systematic persecution of blacks, Native Americans, and, at various times and places, other groups. Aggregate economic development and systematic persecution of selected groups which justifies flight in reasonable fear aren't mutually incompatible.

> Do you think the instances “fleeing” is the bulk of the cases?

By definition, it's 100% of the cases that would be legitimate before validating the family relationship.

Requiring papers to prove one's own identity and familial relationships is anathema to the traditions of Common Law.

Of course, this tradition is being undermined left and right for the sake of the convenience, prejudices, and the power to control, of the ruling classes. And we go along with it, because there are some defensible reasons for doing so.

It's why I prefer online services that allow users to pick their own names. Here, I'm logfromblammo, and that's all anybody needs to know about me. In contrast, on Facebook, the terms of service require me to link my account to the identity I use for official interactions with the government, which is in turn linked to the name my parents gave me at birth.

Without descending into the identity derpfest propagated by some right-leaning libertarians, controlling my own identity means that it is more difficult to hurt me by hacking documents linked to my government identity. The more private businesses use the government identity exclusively, the more identity fraud and identity theft can become a problem.

This type of DNA-collecting dragnet reinforces the paradigm "you are who the government/company/computer says you are" over "you are who you claim to be". Getting sent to the vice principal's office to be disciplined for something that another person, enrolled at my high school with the same name as mine, had done is as close as I ever want to get to that. I got yelled at, for their mistake in identification. I am the only person who can really be sure that I am me, and I don't trust others not to screw that up--because they keep on screwing it up.

Asking for someone's "papers" to prove anything is never going to be something I could support unconditionally. Whenever you do that, you're taking away someone's agency to be in control of their own life.

Not all adoptions are "official" and "have papers," especially adoptions by people who are fleeing their country. I would argue that most adoptions in so-called "third world countries" are probably unofficial.

That’s possible but also adoptions aren’t as common as in the US. I’ve had conversations with people from some of these areas and adoption is hardly considered as an option to adding to a family.

Huh? You have an extremely narrow view of adoption, I would assume most "unofficial" adoptions are by circumstance, not a generic desire to add to the family.

I'm an adoptive parent in the US and I've been waiting months for that paperwork........

There will certainly be some guys traveling with a child they believe to be theirs. Until the test comes back.

Won’t most the cases be either mother-child or mother-(adult male)-child? I don’t see father-child being the predominant grouping.

Good to know that adoptions aren't "real." So if a kid's parent dies and they're living with an aunt, that's not "real" and the government is free to tear the child's remaining family away and replace it with rape and imprisonment.

Way to mitigate the issue. Damn the consequences.

adoptions have a paper trail.

Not a given, particularly for people fleeing countries in crisis, disarray, or violent turmoil. Or if a parent died during the migration, etc.

> if a parent died during the migration

so if a parent dies any rando in the caravan can claim the child and get all the attached benefits? gee, wonder if that kind of reward would have side effects on the safety of migrants with children.

What "benefits" are you talking about?

Migrants at the border are handled with different policies if they arrive with children rather than alone

Births don't even have a paper trail in much of the world.

Do non-familial adoptions actually happen in any sort of significant numbers in central american countries?

I'd actually like to know if blended families occur more often than "child recycling". (Blended Families == adoption, divorce and remarriage, godfathering/godmothering, other culturally normatized familial-like relationships that aren't necessarily accepted as a "nuclear family"...)

(Disclaimer: I have no real opinions on this, but I'd like to get the facts.)

It would mitigate this issue to an extent, but also introduces new challenges (for instance and as pointed to elsewhere: dealing with officially/unofficially adopted children). I'm not sure if there are published numbers on what fraction of adult asylum seekers are attempting to use children in this way, but the preoccupation with "solving" this particular issue demonstrates that either (a) that fraction is disturbingly high or (b) we'd like to make the process even more complicated for no particularly good reason. The trend of every policy along the border seems to suggest that (b) is more likely, which is upsetting.

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