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