How DNA Tracking and Processing Can Help Ukraine's (And Libya's And Venezuela's And... ) Refugees
A modest proposal for a new way of thinking about processing the vulnerable
We need gates, not walls, for the world’s refugees. Sentries manning those gates need to determine whether the person before them is friend or foe — the key distinction for sovereigns carrying about their people.
The sentry must make the decision quickly. In our globalized world time is always of the essence. Globalization is the movement of goods, information, and most of all, people.
While natural resources are very important to economic growth, they are often distributed in hard to reach locales. People, by contrast, can and do move — often the best move toward the metropoles. The state has a compelling interest in building a kind of “sorting hat” to identify the skills and traits of would be immigrants, moving them from yet another mouth to feed to productive member of the body politic. This is admittedly a difficult process but it is a process that has been undertaken many times in the West and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.
As the number of failed states continue to rise we need options to process these people quickly, cheaply, and accurately, and without anything other than the clothes on their back.
Logically this situational assessment needed to process these refugees leads to two technologies — facial recognition and DNA analysis. (To be sure we ultimately need to create technologies which stop failed states from emerging in the first place but that is beyond the scope of this discussion. Hint: we need solutions beyond sanctions.)
There will unfortunately be more wars, more refugees, and more need to process greater numbers of people, especially as climate change makes large swaths of the Earth uninhabitable.
Worse yet, many nations around the world, including some of the most populous, lack even the most rudimentary biometrics. (Trump’s so-called Muslim ban was really a reflection of this reality.)
We therefore must build those biometrics for the people in these failed states and use those biometrics to sort the refugees accordingly. This is especially important in cases where the migrant is a child and there are estimated one million or so child refugees. (Further reading: https://www.cbp.gov/frontline/border-crisis-cbp-fights-child-exploitation).
I’ve thought about these issues since I was a young boy. My late grandfather — LTC Carl W. Lundquist — ran Fort Indiantown Gap, among the largest of the Vietnamese, Thai, and Cambodian refugee resettlement camps.
He struggled with separating “crooks from cooks” and “spies from housewives.” He relied upon religious organizations to take in and sponsor the Southeast Asian refugees.
Over the years my companies — Clearview and Traitwell — have developed two options that I think my grandfather would have liked. He was proud of my technology investing and entrepreneurship and, having worked for E Systems, a defense contractor after his long military and intelligence career, we often discussed the ways in which American companies can safeguard freedom while listening to classical music and discussing the latest spy novel or film.
One option — the Clearview option — is to track people using facial recognition both at the border and within country, should they somehow manage to find their way into the country surreptitiously. Who are you and what are you doing in my country are essential questions for the state, especially those bordering conflict areas. Clearview’s reliance on public photos already posted online as well as those in the custody of the government can be particularly helpful.
The rise of law enforcement using facial recognition at traffic stops is a welcome sign, notwithstanding the clamor of foreign-funded interest groups. Hopefully a world in which cops shoot photos rather than perps is a safer one for cop and civilization alike. The clamor for body cameras after shootings to keep police accountable raises the larger question of what other insights might be gleaned from that footage.
Another option — Traitwell — is to track people at the point of entry and to study how they might be a value add rather than a drain on the host country. This requires genetics, preferably full genome sequencing.
As time has gone on we’ve gotten better at sequencing the human genome and there have been a corresponding explosion in genome wide associate studies. The bigger the GWAS sample size, the more interesting and important the findings. Diversity remains a problem, however, yet fortunately for us refugees are a human problem and seemingly affect humans of all different races.
Most countries have a commitment to nationalized health care and even the glaring exception — the United States — still offers charity care for its poorest denizens and new migrants.
By some estimates it costs about $16,000 to settle one refugee or roughly, $80,000 over 5 years. Sequencing — at sub $1000 and soon sub $100 — can help the sovereign make key decisions about where to put scarce resources and spend those resources more efficiently.
In processing refugees the state should photograph them and ask key questions about medical health — in much the same way that we once did at Ellis Island. We can then take their DNA and then know how to treat them throughout the course of their time in the West.
You never know how a refugee might turn up.