Chinese and Russians living outside of China and Russia will not be affected by the ban.
You keep calling it xenophobia even after you've been proven wrong when you claimed this is targetted at green-card holders. You are absolutely disengenuous and have no intention at good-faith discussion.
I would fully defend Russians against this sort of xenophobia as well. They just don't seem to be the enemy du jour. Complaining about Russia is so 2018. America has a short attention span, and has moved on to the next great evil.
> Regardless, the GP does raise a valid point that if you have family living under the heel of a totalitarian dictatorship they can and will be used as leverage.
Okay, so now you can edit our your attacks above, because you see that the post I was responding to did discuss targeting Chinese and Russian people living in the US.
> Your whinging won't change that fact, and it has nothing to do with them being Chinese (or Russian!), and everything to do with their country's government.
Regardless of the rationale, they're still being targeted on the basis of their nationality. The general impression is being created that all Chinese and Russian people in the US are potential national security threats, whose employment should be restricted. I don't see any functional or moral difference between that and xenophobia. It reminds me of the generalized suspicion of Muslims after 9/11. It's not a pretty thing, and it's sad to see it gaining currency.
Unfortunately I can no longer edit my reply - please take my apology for misunderstanding your argument.
Back on topic of green cards: whether you want to bury your head in the sand or face the reality that foreign dictatorships will use their own citizens to infiltrate their rivals is up to you. If you want to take the high road you can, and likely be excluded from government contract work.
Don't get me wrong on one thing, the west is in a precarious situation of openly doing the same thing in certain cases - eg: Australia's draconian backdoor law. I will not hire or recommend hiring an autralian dev working in Australia - and you can call me a racist or xenophobe if you want, it will not change the reason for the decision.
Fortunately for an australian immigrant abroad they are not going to have their family black-bagged for failure to submit to their government. I don't have this confidence for Russia, and especially not China.
We're really getting into the realm of fantastical scenarios now. The idea that the Chinese government would kidnap the family of a US-based employee in order to force them to hand over data is completely hypothetical, and to my knowledge not backed up by any known case. If they're willing to go to those lengths, they could just as easily blackmail or bribe any random employee. They surely have the power to do so, as does every government with any intelligence service to speak of.
What I do know is that there's an increasing atmosphere of generalized suspicion against Chinese people in the United States, and even of people of Chinese descent. There are lots of recent examples, but to give you just one chilling one: US government pressured Emory University to fire two US-citizen medical researchers of Chinese origin, for the non-crime of pursuing research collaborations in China. The two are leading researchers into Huntington's disease. At the time they pursued their collaborations in China, such collaborations were encouraged by the university, and they pursued them openly. Their entire lab was closed down, and the more junior researchers from China were sent home. This is not an isolated case.
I can't see what's changed to warrant this crackdown in the last few years, other than the quite open discussion in US foreign policy circles about the need to maintain US hegemony, and the long-term threat to that hegemony from a rising China. This has been accompanied in recent months by increasingly hysterical media coverage. One of the most consistently frustrating things about the US is the susceptibility of the public to these periodic campaigns of demonization. Obama laughed about Russia in 2012, but in 2016, Americans suddenly discovered that Russia is the root of all evil in the world - they're even responsible for racial tension in the US! Something similar is happening with China now, and it's reached such proportions that even a Chinese app that teenagers use to share lip-sync videos is a national security risk.
That you find this scenario so fantastical is naive...and yes, the Chinese government openly threatening its own citizens abroad is documented. What do you think of the following article, is it cause for concern for you, or do you believe it's just our media misrepresenting China?
Blackmailing any random employee (with their family safely in the US or another western country) is absolutely not the same as blackmailing an employee with the family still living in China or Russia.
If you have family in China and you have access to government information or IP they want it is not at all far fetched they will do this.
Threatening the families of separatist activists is definitely wrong and despicable, but it's very different from what we're discussing here. I haven't heard of any cases similar to the type of scenario you're suggesting.
I can't see how you think there's absolutely no connection here. The Chinese government has demonstrated very clearly it will coerce their citizens' compliance - they're not going to be immune to this just by not being activists.
If you have something they want - or are able to do something they want - it's quite obvious they will use your family as leverage.
That hasn't been demonstrated. You're citing the treatment of Chinese people abroad who are affiliated with CIA-funded separatist organizations and drawing conclusions about how random people working for tech companies will be treated. I don't think these situations are analogous.
If I ran state security for a poor African dictatorship, I would find all successful expatriates in the .US/.EU/.AU and sell their details to other nasty outfits and offer to "apply my heel" to their families for a fee.
You keep calling it xenophobia even after you've been proven wrong when you claimed this is targetted at green-card holders. You are absolutely disengenuous and have no intention at good-faith discussion.