Debashish Munshi & Priya Kurian The University of Waikato

1. Scientific and social border crossings: Intersections between the discourses of genetic modification and immigration in New Zealand Debashish Munshi & Priya Kurian The University of Waikato

2. Closing demographic borders • Race-ing immigration policy • Excerpts from interviews: • A racist employment policy is driving a racist immigration policy’. • ‘I mean one could be cynical and say that it [the new immigration policy] is another way for a white country to keep itself white’. • ‘Employers think that human capital must look a certain way’.

3. Constructing cultural boundaries • Excerpts from interviews: • ‘We don’t have a strong sense of identity and confidence that can deal with diversity without feeling threatened by it—a deep feeling of threat to our cultural identity’. • ‘I think that purity [of society] does come into a little bit of this because there is an assumption that thesepeople are doing things that we wouldn’t do, and it’s that kind of thing, you know, ‘look at them, look at the way they live, look at all the children they have, look at the way they go get drunk …’

4. Opening genetic borders • 843 public submissions in 2002 against the application by AgResearch, Hamilton, to introduce human proteins into cows • Only 4 in favour • Application granted • Moratorium on release of GM organisms lifted in 2003

5. Science and society • Excerpts from interviews: • ‘where there are scientists involved, they are very arrogant about the so-called objectivity of scientific truth and that that carries untold more weight with politicians than public opinion; where scientists aren’t involved and there are politicians involved, they’ll give a lot more weight to public opinion’. • ‘If it’s a food, what’s the effects of ingesting that, is there going to be any subsequent gene transfer… I think the people who want to save the moratorium are probably saying until you can guarantee that this is 100 percent safe you should leave it alone. The problem is it’s very hard to actually get that guarantee…’

6. Immigration and GM on a common matrix • Do the issues of immigration and GM have anything in common? • Biological entities are involved in both these social issues: humans and non-humans. • Genetic engineering can potentially be a tool for eugenics; so can immigration policy (select particular attributes in people and then close the door on those who do not fit). • Both mark, erase, and negotiate boundaries – physical, cultural, social, economic, and moral. • Both deal with conceptions of ‘Purity’ • Both are driven by ‘hypercapitalism’.

7. Typology of perspectives

8. Contradictory approaches • Policy makers in NZ appear to be moving towards the ‘rigid boundaries’ option in the case of immigration but seem to be more inclined towards the ‘flexible boundaries’ option in the case of GM. • Why?

9. Western gatekeepers • Pervasive influence of the dominant discourse of western neo-colonialism • Border controls and the ‘other’

10. Negotiating borders for sustainability • ‘I cannot help but hear in the biotechnology debates the unintended tones of fear of the alien and suspicion of the mixed. In the appeal to intrinsic natures, I hear a mystification of kind and purity akin to the doctrines of white racial hegemony and U.S. national integrity and purpose that so permeate North American culture and history. I know that this appeal to sustain other organisms’ inviolable, intrinsic natures is intended to affirm their difference from humanity and their claim on lives lived on their terms and not ‘man’s.’ The appeal aims to limit turning all the world into a resource for human appropriation. But it is a problematic argument resting on unconvincing biology….The tendency by the political ‘left’ to collapse molecular genetics, biotechnology, profit, and exploitation into one undifferentiated mass is at least as much of a mistake as the mirror image reduction by the ‘right’ of biological -- or informational -- complexity to the gene and its avatars, including the dollar.’ (Haraway, 1997:61-62)

11. The problem with boundaries comes up most significantly in situating ourselves in the context of (political, economic and cultural) globalization. Champions of globalization offer the promise of the borderless world, ‘of a unified humanity no longer divided by east and west, North and South, Europe and its Others, the rich and poor…. these discourses set in motion the belief that the separate histories, geographies and cultures that have divided humanity are now being brought together by the warm embrace of globalization, understood as a progressive process of planetary integration’ (Coronil 2000: 351-2). Yet, as critics have pointed out, the globalized world is one that is not only hopelessly divided between the privileged and the underprivileged but is also one where dominant, often First World, elites have a lopsided share of the power to shape the world (Kurian and Munshi, 2003).