It's not xenophobic to want or expect a country to protect its IP from a country known to openly flout such rules.
Questioning why Chinese nationals are hired in tech is xenophobia. Period.
You should probably have made that clear in your original comment. I missed it myself.
I think they were questioning why Apple would hire a non-US citizen to work closely on valuable US trade secrets.
Right, xenophobia.
It's not xenophobic to exclude people who are citizens of a country with no extradition treaty from working on sensitive projects.
It would be but nobody really does that on the basis of extradition treaties anyway.
Also consider a large number of Russian and Chinese spies have been American citizens born in America and who've lived in America their whole lives. Collaboration with a foreign government is not 1-to-1 with what country you're a citizen of.
It's certainly not 1 to 1, but it's hardly farfetched to believe that someone born in China and presumably still a citizen of it (and thus not of the US) is more likely to abscond to China with the proprietary IP of an American company than a random American citizen born in America who's lived there their entire life.
Yes, of course, but if you start looking at everyone from a foreign country with suspicion, you're not going to have a tenable situation. For certain extremely high-value things like military and defense projects, those precautions are necessary, but otherwise you're just eliminating large amounts of potential talent for probably no good reason.