Forgone, Not Forgotten: “DNA Fingerprinting,” Migration Control and Britain’s DNA Profiling Pilot Project

Abstract

DNA profiling has become a culturally ubiquitous technology. Its use, whether in forensic investigations, genetic databases, biomedical research, international border-making, or popular genealogy, has been familiarized through political debates, media and cultural representations and commercialization. DNA profiling has also attracted considerable scholarly attention across this terrain. However, scant attention has been paid to the key role played by legal migration in driving DNA profiling’s initial translation from lab bench discovery to “truth machine” and identity token. Here, I discuss the first state-sponsored use of DNA profiling as a tool for establishing kinship relations among legal but racialized migrants on Britain’s borders in the mid-1980s. I argue that this early “experiment” conditioned the commercialization and future uses of the technology at and beyond border zones. Reinstating migration as the origin context for DNA profiling, and retracing the postcolonial routes by which it entered the biopolitical sphere, sheds light on the conjoined naturalization and racialization of genetic technologies of identity and identification, whether at or beyond national borders.