There are plenty of people of Chinese ancestry (or Asian ancestry in general) who have no family (within a few generations), friends, or relations to China, and never stepped foot there.
If the objection is to naturalized US citizens from China who have still have ties to China (I am one of those people), fair enough, but then there are three problems:
1. You should be filtering for foreign connections in general, not for ethnicity. That test already happens in the process of getting security clearance.
2. You can leverage people in plenty of other ways that do not involve threatening friends or relatives. Both the US and China have teams in government agencies that do that for a living.
3. Oh man this is a huge can of worms when it comes to civil rights, equality, and constitutional issues in general.
That makes for a not-very-accurate filter that is ethically suspect that is also not hard to bypass for the seemingly valuable intel underneath. Seems like bad ROI.
Perhaps I really am naive as you say, but on the second order of analysis it seems to me like an ineffective policy if it were actually a policy.
Companies can decline to hire someone for a position that requires a security clearance if they have reason to believe that it will be difficult or impossible for that person to obtain a clearance. There is a specific exception to nondiscrimination laws for this: Section 703(g).
Section 703(g) exceptions are somewhat tricky from a HR perspective because they can edge into territory that would normally be an EEO violation (I mean, obviously, since it's an exception to the rule) and there's very little precedent on them. AFAIK, there's only one court case around about it, where a guy was not hired for a cleared position on account of having family in Cuba. [1] The decision not to hire him, based on the reasonable belief that he would not be clearable, was considered acceptable. "Example 3" on that page also gets into another common scenario, which is declining to hire someone based on the belief that their clearance process would be long, and the company has an immediate need. (IMO, this is the most common scenario. Someone with a lot of family in China or Russia might well be clearable, but their clearance might be likely to take too long for them to be a viable candidate, particularly at a company that doesn't have non-cleared work for them to do in the meantime.)
(I'm not who you responded to,) It is a known tactic of the Chinese government. This book has a good overview of their intelligence apparatus: https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Intelligence-Operations-Nicho... . This isn't an abstract concern, it is something that has happened thousands of times, for political and industrial espionage and political repression.
There are plenty of people of Chinese ancestry (or Asian ancestry in general) who have no family (within a few generations), friends, or relations to China, and never stepped foot there.
If the objection is to naturalized US citizens from China who have still have ties to China (I am one of those people), fair enough, but then there are three problems:
1. You should be filtering for foreign connections in general, not for ethnicity. That test already happens in the process of getting security clearance.
2. You can leverage people in plenty of other ways that do not involve threatening friends or relatives. Both the US and China have teams in government agencies that do that for a living.
3. Oh man this is a huge can of worms when it comes to civil rights, equality, and constitutional issues in general.
That makes for a not-very-accurate filter that is ethically suspect that is also not hard to bypass for the seemingly valuable intel underneath. Seems like bad ROI.
Perhaps I really am naive as you say, but on the second order of analysis it seems to me like an ineffective policy if it were actually a policy.