Isaac Owusu had no idea what was in store when he decided to take a DNA test to bring his four sons to the US from Ghana. As I wrote last summer, immigrants are increasingly being asked by the US government to prove their family relationships using DNA. But Isaac, a new US citizen, had no idea that he’d unearth a nightmare.
Only one of his four sons are biologically related to him. The oldest son was allowed to go to the US but the other three had to stay in Ghana. They’re representative of the statistics. According to Mary K Mount of the AABB, 15 to 20% of immigration cases end up with the same conclusion – testing proves that parent and child do not share the same DNA.
Children under 16 can still be adopted but in Isaac’s case, his three younger children were already 19 and 17-years-old. The New York Times has story after story of families who are experiencing the same nightmare. DNA doesn’t define us but it can define families.
We all know that a “family” often goes beyond DNA, but without DNA testing, some potential immigrant “families” can become surprisingly large. This means that for “non-blood related” families, judgement needs to be on a case-by-case basis, greatly increasing the overall waiting time to be admitted for those families. Thirty years ago, it took me three years to gain US residency for my “family” of two, and today I know it would be considerably longer. I believe a longer waiting time for admittance is a loss for both potential immigrants and for the USA, so if DNA testing helps speed things up for some families, it is a useful tool.
I just discussed this NYT article on my blog today too. This is a delicate but essential topic, one that is central to the field of genetic genealogy. I appreciate the fact that genetic testing is trying to weed out the illicit activity of immigrants bringing unrelated immigrants into the country, but should the testing exclude people that immigrants believe are family? For this particular use, should family be defined by DNA? As DNA testing becomes more popular and more inexpensive (including whole genome sequencing in the not-too-distant future), the detection of a non-parental event will also become more common. It will be interesting to see how society and the government adapt the definition of “family” and “related” in the wake of the genomic revolution.