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Comment by djohnston | Hacker News Reader

The fact that Raytheon is hiring mainland-born engineers to work anywhere near the Patriot missile system is basically malicious incompetence

EDIT I take it all back. There is nothing wrong with this.

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IANAL, but I think the US presidency is the only job that requires one to be a natural born US citizen. For any other job, you may need to be a citizen (e.g., to hold a clearance), but basing eligibility on the country of birth is likely illegal.

Jizhong Chen is an American citizen.

Do you think it will prevent people here from being racist?

Edit: it will not, I am not Chinese btw

And a Chinese citizen, according to the article.

> “The government’s argument that Mr. Zhang poses a flight risk because he is a Chinese citizen is insufficient to warrant GPS monitoring,” Olmos said in a filing

I'm not sure how he got a security clearance, or if he was able to get one at all

EDIT: my mistake, Zhang is the one accused of stealing confidential information from Apple alone, not from Raytheon

IIRC China doesn't allow for dual citizenship. So it's either one or the other.

Maybe they allow it if you're stealing missile secrets?

This is (at least, typically) the case. A friend of mine who was born in Shanghai but is now a Canadian citizen had to go through an arduous visa process to get a job in her home city.

My understanding is that Mr. Zhang is a different person from Mr. Chen.

My mistake, I confused which person was accused of which crime

Yes, born in (and trying to return to) China

Overwhelmingly, to the point of near-universality, foreign-born US citizens don't conduct espionage on behalf of their native countries. At the same time, native-born US citizens do in fact conduct espionage, often in more lurid and damaging ways than any foreign-born agent. What is there to learn from someone's country of origin? Nothing at all.

Penalizing citizens because they happen to have been born in disfavored countries is both immoral and, in ways we're still grappling with since Korematsu, un-American.

Do you have any evidence? Particularly, who is more likely to take American state secrets at company X and give them to China, American born citizens or Chinese born citizens working at company X? Those are the boundaries of this discussion. There are national reports about Chinese espionage efforts within the US, in fact according to wiki they are the single most active adversary in this regard (wiki Chinese espionage in the US).

There are as I understand it many hundreds of thousands of Chinese-born American citizens. Any claim that a significant number of them were agents for China would be an extraordinary one, and would be the argument that actually required evidence. Without that evidence, it's just a slur, and one with a very poor history in the US.

We are, by the way, the targets of espionage from virtually every industrialized country in the world, and, of course, the conductors of the same against other countries. When my career in information security was getting started in the mid-1990s, what I heard most often was the "surprising fact" that France was one of our biggest espionage adversaries. There is nothing unique about China in this regard other than the country's scale.

>> who is more likely to take American state secrets at company X and give them to China

This sounds very similar to sexist arguments like "who is more likely to better score at work" used to then discriminate. You cannot use just a single feature to classify people in this highly non-linear problem, you will get mostly false-positive predictions.

Discriminating solely on country of origin is illegal, I'm pretty sure.

For critically sensitive defense contracts? I would hope not.

To be clear, you're saying that we should discriminate against naturalized citizens, which is directly opposed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

Not the OP, but I would say that yes, sometimes the risk is just too high. There's no inherent right to be granted a security clearance.

To your point though, I'm not sure how a blanket ban of e.g. naturalized citizens from country X jives with anti-discrimination law. If I had a better internet connection at the moment I'd look into it.

iirc, I believe there is a national security exception, and there are obviously others. As a man, go ahead and try to apply for a position as a stripper at a male oriented club, or as a waiter at Hooters. The Christian Coalition of <whatever> isn't required to hire atheists.

In general yes, though there are some significant carve-outs for projects of military sensitivity.

But the legal tension between antidiscrimination and mandatory state-security-derived discrimination is there.

Source? I do not see any exemptions offered in the Civil Rights Act. If you're a citizen, I don't see how anyone can legally discriminate against you.

Section 703(g)

See: https://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/national_security_exemption...

ITAR law. The company can't discriminate in hiring for reasons of national origin alone, but a US citizen doesn't automatically stop being a citizen of another country, and ITAR prohibits letting foreign citizens touch some sensitive missile tech secrets.

... and then an employer can refrain from hiring someone because ITAR prevents them from doing the relevant job.

According to the article, this person is a dual citizen. You generally won't be granted a security clearance in the US unless you renounce your citizenship in the other country (generally, there are exceptions).

According to Chinese nationality law, dual citizenship is impossible for people who naturalize under another country. As a matter of law to the Chinese government, they would lose their Chinese citizenship automatically, to be enforced any time the issue comes up, such as for passport renewal or getting visas to visit under a foreign passport.

His lawyer said he has Chinese citizenship

> “The government’s argument that Mr. Zhang poses a flight risk because he is a Chinese citizen is insufficient to warrant GPS monitoring,” Olmos said in a filing

EDIT: wrong person, confused Zhang and Chen. Zhang is a Chinese citizen, Chen is the one accused of stealing classified material

Apparently, the US naturalization process allows prior citizenship to be kept:

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/dual-citizenship-all...

It looks like the job required a security clearance, so they can deny you access based on a number of things. I've known people born and raised in the USA who were denied clearance to work on specific projects because they happened to be friends with foreign nationals outside of work.

Sure, but those things aren't a protected class AFAIK.

Carve-outs exist:

(e) Businesses or enterprises with personnel qualified on basis of religion, sex, or national origin; educational institutions with personnel of particular religion

Notwithstanding any other provision of this subchapter, (1) it shall not be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to hire and employ employees ... on the basis of his religion, sex, or national origin in those certain instances where religion, sex, or national origin is a bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business or enterprise ...

(g) National security

Notwithstanding any other provision of this subchapter, it shall not be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire and employ any individual for any position, for an employer to discharge any individual from any position, or for an employment agency to fail or refuse to refer any individual for employment in any position, or for a labor organization to fail or refuse to refer any individual for employment in any position, if-

(1) the occupancy of such position, or access to the premises in or upon which any part of the duties of such position is performed or is to be performed, is subject to any requirement imposed in the interest of the national security of the United States under any security program in effect pursuant to or administered under any statute of the United States or any Executive order of the President; and

(2) such individual has not fulfilled or has ceased to fulfill that requirement.

Thanks for the context.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1324b

Paragraph 2, Section C

I think they do it through their secret/top secret clearances. You just don't get them and aren't eligible to work on a project. And they don't tell you why, of course.

It's the other way around. For example, Elon once mentioned that since SpaceX is basically working on the same tech as missile systems, there are lots of restrictions on who SpaceX is allowed to hire. One of those restrictions involved country of origin, but I can't remember the details.

I worked on a government project once and they had the requirement that anyone working on the project had to be an American citizen. You could be naturalized, but you had to be a citizen. And this was a pretty unimportant project for a state government.

Often that has more to do with not wanting bad press about hiring foreigners with tax money than a security thing

Show me one article criticising a US government for employing a foreigner with your line of nationalistic reasoning and I'll belief you.

It sometimes happens with procurement ("buy American"), or for security concerns as in the linked article. But not for employment. Heck, even Trump employed dozens of Ukrainian/Greece/British people as we've learnt.

I wasn’t talking about the private sector.

I was talking about government work contracts, like the state work the parent comment was referring to.

My family members work in politics. These kinds of things are considered when making all decisions because they don’t want to attract any negative press or give potential narratives to future opponents. That’s how politics works from the inside, at least for Democrats in America.

Everyone on here so prickly lately

I think residency status can have some bearing but not ethnicity. Any company can refuse to sponsor a visa but if someone is eligible to work without sponsorship I don't think you can ask more than that.

> One of those restrictions involved country of origin, but I can't remember the details.

Maybe security clearance restrictions? IIRC to get clearance you're not allowed to have dual citizenship (b/c divided loyalties) nor relationships with foreign citizens that could open you up to influence/coercion (e.g. a foreign citizen spouse or relatives residing in a foreign country that could be threatened for leverage).

Bloomberg:

> ... trips they were about to take to China when they were arrested were planned for the purpose of visiting relatives, not escaping prosecution.

So, they were vulnerable to overwhelming coercion.

What would you or I do if a man stopped us on the street, said he worked for "state security", that our parents were well and enjoying their pension in <small city>, and everyone hopes they will remain so, but that the motherland needed one little patriotic task from us just now?

That sounds made up. There's people from countries like China, Russia, and Iran that have been able to get security clearances in the US. You may have to give up your birth country's citizenship, and someone from Iran is definitely more likely to be denied a clearance, but there's not blanket discrimination based on national origin. I don't think ITAR even distinguishes between someone who was born here and someone who was naturalized (as long as they don't keep their old passport).

It's amazing how many people are misinformed here, because this guy is right. It's illegal to discriminate on country of origin, full stop[1]. It's illegal to discriminate on citizenship, unless it's mandatory. If someone is authorized to work in the US, you cannot take their country of origin into account[2]. If they require sponsorship, you are not required to provide it.

For the small class of jobs that require citizenship, it is illegal to discriminate on naturalization status.[3]

[1]https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central/1123-national-origin-discr... [2]https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central/1122-citizenship-status-di... [3]https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central/employee-rights-discrimina...

They effectively restrict it by considering ties to certain countries to be a risk.

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