China has demonstrated an unsettling ability to recruit ethnic Chinese living in the U.S. as spies. A web search would turn up a number of examples, including most recently the individual who worked for Senator Dianne Feinstein in her San Francisco office.
This raises a massively not-PC question. Perhaps President Roosevelt and his Canadian counterpart were right when they interned the ethnic Japanese living in the western U.S. and Canada following Pearl Harbor? Perhaps something similar could happen again? These are issues countries with many immigrants (e.g., Australia, Canada, the U.S.) have to face in perilous times.
We like to forget the anti-German fervor that swept the U.S. during what was then called the Great War, and we now name World War I. Many Schmidts became Smiths and Weinhardts became Vineyards then.
I had occasion to be aware of this earlier revulsion for all things German because the small SoCal town where I grew up was, before 1917, called “Nordhoff” to honor writer Charles Nordhoff. During World War I that Germanic name was changed to “Ojai,” the Indian name of the small valley in which it was located.
Stiff-necked members of the high school board wouldn’t change its name. Thus forty years later I graduated from Nordhoff High School.
