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So the Genetic Forge is a secret illegal human engineering project taking place underground in many large underground buildings in the Appalachian mountains. And this place needs workers but not just any workers very specific workers for cheap. So my question is, based on the requirements below what would be the best country(s) to kidnap orphans from?

  • Need to be double orphans (both parents are missing or dead).

  • No citizens of the USA.

  • Can't speak English and whichever language they speak needs to be very different from it, so basically a non-Anglo-Saxon nor Latin derived language.

  • A high amount of orphans to be taken and re-supplied every 5-10 years.

  • Countries where they are being taken need to be terrible at keeping track of the orphans or just not care.

  • Needs to have existed since 1970.

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    $\begingroup$ English is a non-Latin derived language. $\endgroup$
    – errantlinguist
    Apr 16, 2018 at 3:33
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    $\begingroup$ Not a full answer, there is a slave trade going on in Libya right now. $\endgroup$
    – Vincent
    Apr 16, 2018 at 3:41
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    $\begingroup$ @errantlinguist while technically you're correct, English is at the very least a Latin-influenced language insofar as many common English words in every day use draw their origins from Latin, Greek or even French (which IS a Latin-derived language). Without speaking for the OP, my interpretation of the intent behind the requirement is that the language should be so alien to English speakers that there's no chance of locals being able to understand the Orphans (or vice versa) should they break out. $\endgroup$
    – Tim B II
    Apr 16, 2018 at 6:24
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    $\begingroup$ double orphans... make sure your plan weeds out kids who have a sympathy towards bats! $\endgroup$
    – Michael
    Apr 16, 2018 at 17:24
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    $\begingroup$ @sgroves it looks like the definitions user45751 is using come from e.g. UNICEF and UNAIDS but as a native speaker I've never heard "orphan" used this way; it's possibly terminology specific to the field and therefore doesn't make sense outside of it. $\endgroup$
    – errantlinguist
    Apr 18, 2018 at 12:19

7 Answers 7

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Welcome to Afghanistan

Afghanistan is a location that has been in almost constant conflict since around 1970 and has a VERY high rate of orphan 'production' as a result. There are an estimated 2 million orphans there now.

Their language is not Latin in origin, they most certainly won't be US citizens and given the state of conflict that has existed, it's mostly NGOs that are working on the orphan problem, not the State. This is actually good news for you because your recruitment organisation can use an NGO as a front.

Even if foreign intervention in the country disappears, there are still many competing groups that want to increase their authority in the country which means that there is a large chance of ongoing civil strife for years to come. Given that many of these competing groups operate on a militia basis, kids will lose parents there in the foreseeable future and while I would stress that this is a tragedy in its own right it also means that the ongoing maintenance of orphans and records about orphans in that country will be a mess for years to come; not because they don't care, but because the problem is essentially overwhelming, especially given that the focus has to be on the conflict itself.

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    $\begingroup$ I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and actually came here to post this. In addition something like 30 to 40 percent of their children are orphans (according to a cultural brief we had to go to anyways). Collecting the orphans could be done by the military under the guise of humanitarian action. They used to send us out to do all sorts of covert sneaky secret squirrel stuff under the pretense of building a bridge or water treatment plant. You could even tell the grunts that they were collecting the orphans to an adoption and rehab program and they wouldn't really know any different. $\endgroup$
    – TCAT117
    Apr 16, 2018 at 2:46
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    $\begingroup$ @TCAT117 I've never been there of course so my comments are intended to be purely academic but its deeply concerning to me that my answer can be extended in these directions. I really appreciate the additional details (+1) but you've also shown that sometimes reality is a lot more scary than fiction, more's the pity. $\endgroup$
    – Tim B II
    Apr 16, 2018 at 2:51
  • $\begingroup$ Counter-intel is messy and nasty and you have to tell yourself that you are just following orders a lot. Unfortunately for my career I had a conscience and I quit as soon as my contract was up. $\endgroup$
    – TCAT117
    Apr 16, 2018 at 2:59
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    $\begingroup$ @TCAT117 sounds like half the career options, twice the man IMHO. Just saying. $\endgroup$
    – Tim B II
    Apr 16, 2018 at 4:01
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    $\begingroup$ I spent 12 hours of overtime last night trying to convince a paranoid schizophrenic that the doctor was not a time traveling alien vampire working for the CIA and that nobody was trying to steal his teeth. I ended up having to convince him that I was in possession of the cure for the mind control nanites so he would let me administer the sedative. So I guess I can apply those sociopathic lying skills for good every now and then. $\endgroup$
    – TCAT117
    Apr 16, 2018 at 4:05
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Hope you stay in Myanmar

Although I like @TimB’s answer, here’s the case for Myanmar. There are currently about a combined total of 75,000 insurgents fighting over 250,000 army soldiers in Myanmar. This causes thousands of casualties per year (cumulative ~200,000 killed, 1 million displaced). Too much fighting for the government to care much about orphans. But wait... there’s more!

Rohingya Muslims are a religious minority concentrated in the Rakhine state. They are persecuted and treated as second class citizens and sometimes killed. This divide probably won’t go away very soon. Soooo... current stats are 7,000+ killed, ~1 million displaced.

Finally, their languages come from the Tibet-Burma language tree. Not only is it not understood by European language speakers, it is even highly divergent from Chinese, which means a sizable percentage of people won’t understand it.

Overall, this makes a pretty strong case for Myanmar. “Want that Rohingya orphan out of your streets? We can take them” - Your recruiters

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  • $\begingroup$ Could the conflict possibly last up to 2070 $\endgroup$
    – Amoeba
    Apr 16, 2018 at 3:43
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    $\begingroup$ It’s lasted ever since Myanmar was formed, tbh it’s your judgment whether it will last till 2070 $\endgroup$
    – JSCoder says Reinstate Monica
    Apr 16, 2018 at 3:46
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    $\begingroup$ Good answer. To address the question of how long these conflicts can last, there's a case that Buddist - Muslim tensions globally have already lasted a millenium. I particularly like the language angle as this is a language that is even LESS likely to be spoken by a US national than Arabic, given the focus that culture and language has received in the USA over several decades. $\endgroup$
    – Tim B II
    Apr 16, 2018 at 4:29
  • $\begingroup$ Afghans don't speak Arabic either, though: There are two official languages, Farsi (called Dari there) and Pashto, both Indo-Iranian. Of course, being a Muslim-majority country, there must surely be lots of imams who speak Arabic, but I doubt any pre-adolescent orphans would. That being said, there are probably many many fewer opportunities for someone to speak Rohingya than Pashto or Farsi, which are still spoken by a few million people each. $\endgroup$
    – Wtrmute
    Apr 16, 2018 at 17:33
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This map from Wikipedia's Failed state article ...

World map

... suggests (in no particular order):

  • Central Africa (Chad, Sudan, and CAR) and Somalia
  • Syria and Iraq
  • Yemen
  • Afghanistan and Pakistan
  • North Korea
  • Haiti
  • Bangladesh and Myanmar

IMO "failed state" (or even "fragile state") tends to correlate with "orphans" (and, with no State assistance to other relatives who might otherwise try to seek them).

There are also some secondary candidates from that map:

  • PNG
  • Madagascar
  • Columbia
  • ...

The above map is from 2015: see also List of countries by Fragile States Index for updates (according to which, the same top few as before, Yemen and Syria more "fragile" now than in 2015).

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    $\begingroup$ To be pedantic that map shows the FSI, which is now called the "Fragile State Index" rather than the Failed State. Given what it shows that's probably a better term. $\endgroup$
    – Jack Aidley
    Apr 16, 2018 at 8:24
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AIDS orphans from sub-Saharan Africa.

https://www.avert.org/professionals/hiv-social-issues/key-affected-populations/children

An 'orphan' is defined by the United Nations as a child who has 'lost one or both parents'. An estimated 13.4 million children and adolescents (0-17 years) worldwide had lost one or both parents to AIDS as of 2015. More than 80% of these children (10.9 million) live in sub-Saharan Africa.17 In some countries which are badly affected by the epidemic, a large percentage of all orphaned children – for example 74% in Zimbabwe, and 63% in South Africa – are orphaned due to AIDS.

South Africa alone could probably supply your endeavor with AIDS orphans over the required time period. This would have the added benefit of bad guys with Afrikaaner accents, which are all the rage lately.

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Instead of taking only orphans, the villains could adopt abandoned babies. Payments under the table to both the parents and the authorities could ensure no records are kept, but perhaps they run an agency as a front. They probably get more girls this way than boys, and the majority are probably from Asia, because that’s where the people are.

Then they smuggle the babies into the US the same ways other traffickers do, so they become completely undocumented.

Small children are going to learn whatever language the people around them speak, though. That’s just human biology.

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Why do both parents need to be dead? Kids go missing all the time in every country

Africa or really any war torn / poverty stricken area with lots of refugees. There are thousands of unaccompanied minors coming out of Syria as illegal refugees. Boats are lost at sea all the time. Lots of kids could (and do) go missing and nobody would ever be able to tell.

Lure them out of refugee camps and everyone will just think they've moved on.

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    $\begingroup$ No people to seek out the kids that’s why $\endgroup$
    – Amoeba
    Apr 16, 2018 at 2:38
  • $\begingroup$ Poor people don't have the resources to go looking. If you look at foreign adoptions, it's usually the kids that go looking for the parents when they grow up. $\endgroup$
    – Thorne
    Apr 16, 2018 at 3:31
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    $\begingroup$ In rich countries they go looking but poor countries and war zones, nobody looks. $\endgroup$
    – Thorne
    Apr 16, 2018 at 3:32
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    $\begingroup$ @Thorne I can see the risk though: It only really takes a coupla loving parents coming in to some money and setting out to find their estranged bebbies. $\endgroup$
    – Piomicron
    Apr 18, 2018 at 17:51
  • $\begingroup$ Yep and? They were last seen in a refugee camp and about to catch a smugglers boat. Where do you go from there? It's not like the kidnappers ever let them out in public again. $\endgroup$
    – Thorne
    Apr 18, 2018 at 23:09
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Mother Teresa already ran such an organisation in India. Follow her example. Open an orphan house and just have a high number of them dying under the unsanitary conditions. At least officially. Inofficially, ship them off to your secret base.

Bonus advantage: The whole thing pays for itself via donations.

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