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Sure. This is a measured take. Familial ties are real, childhood upbringing is influential, and they impact things.
This is not, however, an argument of inherent ethnic loyalties overriding all else.
Moreover, it's also not approaching a policy argument of the tradeoffs- costs, benefits, opportunity costs, and so on- that go on with addressing policy questions on, say, college research. Particularly when the actor these people may hypothetically support is using them as complimentary, as opposed to primary, sources, and you do not actually have a monopoly on information control.
China, for example, is generally understood to conduct not only human espionage (asking ethnic Chinese to do things), but engage in routine cyberespionage against not just governments, but commercial actors, including almost certainly universities. (I say almost certainly because attribution is hard.) If the same thing is stolen from all four sources by different means- by the Chinese student, from the university the Chinese student worked at, from the corporation commercializing the research, and from the government that was funding the project / holding the data- then the Chinese student is not, actually, that important to the loss of information.
To be clear, it is a thing, but the nature of information security is that you have to be secure in all zones, and the adversary has to only succeed in one for all the measures taken to fail. There are, in turn, different policy implications for whether you can expect to control the loss of information versus if you cannot. If the student would go to another university at home but get the same research data thanks to theft, there may be an (in)efficiency cost with that for the adversary but it's not like the student isn't getting their hands on the data anyway.
This makes the strategic competition less about 'can students get the data'- the assumption is already 'yes'- to 'who benefits the most when they get their hand on the data.' In other words, who benefits the most- not exclusively- from human capital.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute maintains a Critical Technology Tracker intended to track various critical technologies and who writes the most cited papers on them. This includes their human talent flow tracker, which tracks where the authors of those papers went for undergraduate education, graduate education, and follow-on employment.
From a strategic competition perspective between states, even if you doubt the trustworthiness of these students, the optimal allocation is not 'more educated students employed in the hostile country.' Instead, you want to minimize the number of employed top performers in the countries you want the least benefit. Just like you can't control / maintain a monopoly of the information, you can't maintain a monopoly on the employment prospects of the students. That Top Producer of Cited Research is going to be employed somewhere. You can't feasibly prevent that.
What you can do- and where the cost-benefit tradeoff comes- is shape where they work.
Yes, a Chinese student doing industrial theft is bad. That is both a cost (loss of profits) and a relative loss (gain to the Chinese CCP). But if the cost is going to be incurred in some form regardless (alternative modes of theft), is it a worse cost than the gains of employing the student yourself, and denying them to the competition?
Or- put another way- is China benefiting more from a student-who-could-be-a-rocket-designer being a possible corporate spy facilitating the occasional IP theft, than by having them home being a senior rocket designer?
For a strategy game metaphor, in strategy games there are occasional tradeoffs between an ability that provides a buff with no downside, and another ability that provides a greater buff but with a downside, such as reducing health in exchange for greater offense. While the actual best option is context-dependent, as a matter of human psychology a lot people instinctively shy away from assuming known costs, even if they would be better for it. (Such as the health debuff actually letting you kill more enemies before they can hit you, saving you health despite an upfront cost.) Loss-aversion is real, even if the losses accepted enable greater profits / reduce greater lasses.
This is- loosely- analogous to the costs/benefits of brain drain of foreign students and would-be experts. There are costs to the receiving party / benefits to the sending policy, but these alone do no make refusing the costs an ideal position.
What it should mean- in a reasonable exchange- is setting reasonable limits of cost-benefit tradeoff.
You don't want Iranian students to be on nuclear submarines? Sure. But how about the experimental reactor design program? It's not exactly enabling Iran to go from non-nuclear to nuclear. Or how about Fusion? If that is invented, it'll probably be the fastest-stolen tech in history anyway. Etc. etc.
But once we get to this point of discussion on 'which jobs,' we're already accepting the premise that letting them in has merit in the first place, as opposed to the opposite.
By that reasoning, none of the four sources is important to the loss of information and generalized, nothing at all is important.
Not quite. It's not that nothing is important, but rather that certain objections start to lose value when they amount to special pleading rather than an actual standard of differentiation.
Think of it as analogous to swimming in the rain. Not wanting to go outside when it's raining because you don't want to get wet is fine. Not wanting to go swimming because you don't want to get wet is fine. But if you are getting in the pool, getting out because it's raining isn't compelling on 'because rain gets you wet' grounds. There may be other grounds of leaving- a storm, a need to prepare other things for the rain, what have you- but the specific 'because I'd get wet' basis isn't compelling if you're already wet.
In decision-cost frameworks, costs cease to be disqualifying objections if they're shared across the proposed courses of action. That doesn't mean costs aren't worth controlling.
That's inherent in handling problems one at a time. Otherwise, it becomes "the rain is not important to getting wet because you need to get out of the pool first" and "the pool is not important to getting wet because you need to get out of the rain first", said to someone who is stuck in both of them at once.
If the student "isn't important" because the university, corporation, and government all leak, you could equally say that the university isn't important because the student, corporation, and government all leak. Then you can say that the corporation isn't important...
The effect is that every cause of the problem is "unimportant" because whichever one someone points to, you reply that that wouldn't solve the other causes. Of course it wouldn't. You have to solve them too, but you also have to start somewhere.
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