Illegal entry

Sir: ‘Shoaib M Khan (nothing illegal about them – 2 April) is mistaken. It is well and truly illegal to enter another country without passports, visas and other relevant paper work. This applies to “economic” refugees as well as genuine asylum seekers.
Peter West
Ellenbrook WA

Catching up

Sir: The Panama Papers scandal will have many high profile scumbags ducking for cover and claiming they have done nothing wrong. However, it is worth quoting the loose legal philosophy of the late Thurgood Marshall…You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.
Bernard Corden
Spring Hill, Qld

April fool

Sir: I hope David Flint’s article (2 April) was written on April 1, regarding the hilarious idea of making Tony Abbott, Kevin Andrews, Cory Bernardi and Eric Abetz cabinet ministers in a “unity government”. Unity is not the first word that springs to mind vis-a-vis the above-mentioned wrecking-balls and their war against the 21st century – not to mention their war against Malcolm. If it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke then perhaps David should volunteer for Rod Liddle’s is-it-a-circle-or-a-splodge test for realism, keeping in mind that it’s neither an onion nor a sour grape. I suspect a Collingwood supporter would get a more impartial result. The government is supposed to represent normal Australians, not zealots and ideologues.
R. Graham
Belmont, Vic

Gift of faith

Sir: In his Australian Notes Peter Coleman, following the teaching of Jesus Christ, suggests that we cannot receive the gift of faith unless we first seek it. The uninformed atheist is not able to seek the gift of faith because he is locked into the delusion of his own dogmatic, ebullient and supposedly scientific certitude. He does not recognize that, just like the theist, he too has made a leap that goes beyond the sensory-rational world. Without that recognition he cannot knock.

May God deliver us from the platitudes of uninformed atheists and uninformed theists.
Mark Porter
New Lambton, NSW

Gene genies

Sir: ‘The return of eugenics’ (2 April) links a new technology of gene modification to historic dreams of genetic purification. But we are of course more than our DNA; each of us is a unique person, each mortal, and each worth the attention of science and medicine to alleviate our suffering. This means we must not totally ban the technology of crispr-CAS9, which allows specific editing of even a single letter within our 3 billion-letter human genomes, because it opens many doors to medicine. The single distinction that would allow this technology to serve medicine without also bringing down the curse of rational eugenics would be a ban on all manipulation of cells that make sperm or egg cells; that is, the human germ line. That would allow the treatment and cure of a person by DNA modification, without reopening a punitive eugenic path to two kinds of people.
Robert Pollack
Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University

Embryo selection

Sir: Fraser Nelson is right to identify the developments in human gene-editing as being of profound importance to the future of humanity. However, gene-editing technology is extremely limited in its ability to change traits such as height and intelligence, because there are thousands of genetic variants that affect complex traits such as these, most of them not known. There are, however, technologies other than gene-editing to be worried about. Parents could select the embryo with the greatest genetic potential for height and intelligence out of a pre-implantation selection, for example. The technologies and information necessary for this are close to ready. If restricted to the rich, the implications for growing inequality will be dramatic.
Alexander Young
Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford

The punitive Living Wage

Sir: Martin Vander Weyer is remarkably sanguine about the Living Wage (Any Other Business, 2 April). He should talk to James Forsyth who, as ever, was on target. When it is fully implemented at £9 per hour by 2020, the pay for those over 25 will have risen by some 50 per cent above the recent minimum wage, and with all the add-ons of social security, holidays, pensions and so on, the true cost will be over £11 an hour, higher even than in the USA. This unprecedented increase will bring a wage explosion, higher unemployment and reduced exports. There was a time when government would do anything to tame inflation. George Osborne, our inexperienced social interventionist Chancellor, has really let the inflation genie out of the bottle, and it will be hard to get it in again.
Lord Vinson (Former chairman of the IEA)
Roddam, Northumberland