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Comment by nnm | Hacker News Reader

Can't believe a comment that openly discriminated China-born US citizens is now a top comment. The whole logic behind the argument (around China-born US citizens) is so weak.

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Previous cases of naturalized Chinese-Americans being indicted for espionage/IP theft/national security-related crimes:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/mit-professor-arrested-an...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-navy-officer-his-wife-and-...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-cia-case-officer-charg...

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3104566/ch...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-citizen-...

Isn't citing some example cases pretty poor argument in this case? There are lots of examples of muslim terrorists, so we should just ban all muslims? There are examples of Mexican criminals, so we should just ban all Mexicans?

Edit: Not to mention the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.

The internment of Japanese Americans is actually a pretty good example. As far as the outcome of events is concerned, it doesn't matter whether any of them actually were traitors (as far as I know there were no significant cases), it only matters whether they were depicted as traitors by politicians eager to stoke public xenophobia.

GP stated "the logic behind the argument is weak". I cited cases to demonstrate the legitimate security concerns related to naturalized citizens.

I had a Lance Corporal who worked for me who's father was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. He had to get a waiver for his security clearance because he had a direct connection to a known criminal and racist organization. "Do you, or any of your family, have connections to the CCP?" should probably be a question added to the next version of the SF86 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Form_86 ), and should trigger additional scrutiny. I'm not sure what is measures are in place now but they are clearly insufficient.

It is pretty weak though. It’s the same argument trump made in his Muslim ban and wanting to build a wall along the Mexican border. He had cases he can point to as well.

Ok. What is YOUR threshold for major national security breaches of consistent origin past which we should implement focused control measures to mitigate the risk? And what would your control measures be?

I don’t have a definite answer, but it’s not by country of birth. We’ve had too many ugliness in history stemming from that type of grouping. Because if it’s guilty by association (and not even association of one’s choice), then how is this different from the Japanese internment of WW 2?

Edit: also, is there any evidence that banning people of a certain birth place is actually effective? We already do background checks, and if those don’t screen out the risks, why would an additional blanket ban help?

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