It's not about "looking racist"; or at least, it's not about public opinion. A racially targeted measure would violate specific laws and would be challenged in court, likely successfully.

There have been cases of British, Bulgarian, Canadian, German and Irish nationals also gotten in their claws. Seems pretty race agnostic to me.

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I don't find any materials on ethnic prohibitions. There are a lot of problems with that. Among them, it would either fail to achieve the goal. For example, let's say there was a Turk born and raised in PRC and totally aligned with the CCP: prohibiting Han from working in labs doesn't work.

> Why are we assuming either/both good faith and competence here

There is obviously a breakdown in either communication or understanding here. I have assumed neither good faith nor competence. On the contrary, the strategy I supposed above would be in bad faith and a symptom of incompetence.

Deporting researchers from every country to make it look like they aren't ethnically targetting people is in bad faith, and resorting to such measures instead of simply identifying and deporting the problematic individuals demonstrates their incompetence.

I’m not seeing any ambitious people trying to get into Chinese undergrad universities.

I know a handful of folks who worked at them, and then found a more permanent position in the US.

In geopolitics you are forced to make deals with the devil. We armed and supplied the USSR to defeat Germany in WWII. In the 90s we gave an out of work China a wold franchise so we could make a few extra bucks with cheap labor and one billion consumers. Our blu collar workers would put down their dangerous and heavy machinery on the dank shop floor so they could take snazzy white collar jobs that were healthier and paid better because they use their American education to skill up their brains.

People were sold on that and many bought it. And now here we are living in the aftermath of us propping up systems incongruous to our own and living it down. It comes down to jockeying politicians like J Kerry and company who pretend they work for the people but in all honesty only work for themselves (remember Kerry never threw out his own war medals but rather reproductions he bought in the PX). Jane Fonda, her vanity sunk the nuclear energy industry for fifty years.