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The central themes of this article, family reunification in general, and DNA testing in particular, came to the fore during a research project about young Somalians in Finland. Since 1996, I have been conducting ethnographic research -in schools, youth clubs, streets and cafés -with youngsters from Somalia who arrived in Finland around 1994, and who attend Finnish schools in the suburbs of Helsinki. My general interest in this longitudinal study was to learn about the experiences of coming of age in highly dispersed settings, not only in the vein of a local host country, but also culturally and transnationally. Here, growing up is seen not as a simple biological question. It is a social process in which relationships such as kinship ties are constituted, experienced, and contested. These are powerful relations for individual and social identifications. DNA-testing may both symbolically and physically violate this social process of intimate identifications and personal integrity.

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In contemporary kinship studies, state and family appear to be closely related. This forceful affiliation is a result of complex historical and social contestation where reproduction, socialization and ties of affection are not only naturally intimate but also politically public. Anthropologists have much to comment on this; alas, their educated and comparative observations often go unnoticed. The speakers in this debate more often seem to represent the social policy  rofessions, state bureaucracies and legal expertise.   European immigration politics generally are illustrative. The tightening of residence permits and the control of particular migration groups seem to be  emergent trends. Though state policies and the rationales behind them are often promoted as protection against threats like human trafficking or terrorism, applications of this institutional thinking are largely interpreted as acts of discrimination by the migrants or family members involved. Furthermore, less attention has been paid to how the state classifies families and family members, something which is reproducing rather unrealistic ideals and norms for families and kin groups in general. In fact, the criteria of family relatedness for immigrant families differ from those very practices which are assumed to define family within most welfare states in Europe. In this context, I argue, more comparative, anthropologically-informed analysis would be useful.

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