Biological citizenship across the borders: politics of DNA profiling for family reunification

Abstract

This paper aims to broaden the view of the implications of advanced biomedical technology to biopolitical subjectivity through an analysis of the use of DNA profiling for family reunification of immigrants in Finland and Germany. By exploring complicated connections of biological traits to both national and ‘post-national’ modes of citizenship, the paper demonstrates that ‘biology’ plays an important role in decision-making on citizenship rights and inclusion and exclusion in the nation-state even today. In family reunification through DNA testing, biological criteria may back up ‘post-national’ citizenship and the personal rights of the asylum seeker or immigrant, since the biological tie to his or her family (and not to the nation) provides the basis for the right to enter the country and stay there. However, the ways DNA testing is used by immigration authorities tend to narrow down the applicant's rights by demarcating the family to a biological nuclear family model, by focusing DNA testing in an ethnically biased manner, and by potentially jeopardizing the applicant's informational self-determination in collecting DNA samples and in handling DNA information.

Keywords:

• biological citizenship
• DNA profiling
• family reunification
• Europe
• Finland
• Germany
• immigration policy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my partners in IMMIGENE project for valuable discussions and helpful comments: Professor Dr Thomas Lemke, Dr Torsten Heinemann, Dr Ursula Naue, Dr Anna-Maria Tapaninen, Professor Dr Martin Weiss, Kevin Hall, and Jacob Guggenheimer. I also express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of Distinktion for their instructive criticism of the earlier versions of this paper. The research was funded by the Academy of Finland (project No 135266) as a part of international ELSA-GEN research funding consortium and by Kone Foundation.

Notes on contributor

Ilpo Helén is Professor of Sociology at University of Eastern Finland, Adjunct Professor (Docent) in sociology at University of Helsinki, and Director of Biomedicine in Society (BitS) research platform (Department of Social Research, University of Helsinki and Department of Social Sciences, University of Eastern Finland). His current research is focused on biopolitics and political economy of biomedical high-tech. His recent publications include, for example, Ilpo Helén and Anna-Maria Tapaninen (2013) Closer to the truth: DNA profiling for family reunification and the rationales of immigration policy in Finland (Nordic Journal of Migration Research 3, no. 3: 153–61) and Ilpo Helén and Karoliina Snell (2012) Private life in bits and pieces: Digital and molecular personhood in the information age (in M. Carucci, ed., Revealing privacy. Debating the understandings of privacy, Peter Lang, pp. 133–50)

Notes

1. My study is based on a research project ‘DNA and Immigration’ (IMMIGENE) on the social, political, and ethical implications of DNA testing in Austrian, Finnish, and German immigration policies. The research groups in each country collected and analyzed laws and policy and administrative documents on DNA testing for family unification and conducted over 70 interviews with immigration officials, geneticists, lawyers, and NGO representatives (see Heinemann and Lemke 2013a; 2013b; Helén and Tapaninen 2013) (for further information, see http://www.immigene.eu/).

2. Emergence of the idea of ‘biological citizenship’ in studies of social, political, and ethical dimensions of advanced biomedical technologies is connected to a more general discussion in which the concepts of ‘citizen’ and ‘citizenship’ resurrected in Anglo-Saxon social and political sciences in the late 1980s. In this discussion, the idea of citizenship has become broader, dispersed and fragmented, and transformation of ‘citizenship’ from a concept to a catchword with obscure and banal meanings has been a notable tendency (Heater 1999; Turner 2001; Isin and Turner 2002). The main conceptual inspiration for my paper is derived from Engin Isin's (2002) approach. For him, citizenship is characterized by struggles over definition, recognition, belonging, and inclusion by groups of people attached to a polity. Furthermore, alterity, i.e. a condition in which individuals or groups of people are being altered, modified, and made different, is a core element of citizenship. From Isin's perspective, citizenship is contested and modified in social configurations and by political action, and the concept refers to historically contingent modes of being political.

3. Cohen's view is congruent with Isin's (2002) idea that citizenship should be seen as a domain consisting of different degrees of rights, entitlements, obligations, and power.

4. Those countries are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, the UK, and the USA (EMN 2008; 2009).

5. In March 2012, 46 countries were black-listed: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Benin, Chad, Cambodia, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Dominican Republic, Djibouti, the State of Eritrea, Gabon, the Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, India, Iraq, Kenya, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Laos, Liberia, Mali, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Ruanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Thailand, Togo, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and the Central African Republic (see the German Federal Foreign Office website: http://www.konsularinfo.diplo.de/Vertretung/konsularinfo/de/05/Urkundenverkehr__Allgemein/Urkundenverkehr.html).

6. It is noteworthy that medical examinations may acquire opposite roles in immigration control. In France, verification of serious disease or signs of severe physical or mental abuse (e.g. torture) by medical examination may back up the asylum seeker's application for residence (Fassin and d'Halluin 2005; Ticktin 2011), while findings of disease of severe health impairment may prevent the applicant's entry or staying in the US (Lakhani and Timmermans 2014).