Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California) said in an interview that diplomatic discrimination and violence against members of the Asian American communities’ are different phenomena of the same issue: the inability of our government and some people to distinguish between a foreign government and Americans of Asian descent. It was the incompetence that led the U.S. government to detain more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent ‘during World War II,’ he said.
The process in question – known as ‘allocation restriction’ – places restrictions on a diplomat’s security clearance based on concerns about ‘targeting and harassment by foreign intelligence services, as well as reducing foreign influence’, according to a State Department policy guide.
Links ranging from family ties to significant financial interests or contacts abroad can be used to prevent a diplomat from serving in a particular country, or working on files related to that country. The issue has escalated amid growing growing power competition with China and the North Korean nuclear threat.
One former diplomat subject to restrictions was Rep. Andy Kim (DN.J.), a Boston-American born in Boston, who told MSNBC on Wednesday that although he had “secret security clearance” and served in Afghanistan, ” One day I was told by the State Department that I was banned from working on anything related to the Korean Peninsula. ”
Kim said he was shocked because he had never applied to raise issues regarding the Korean Peninsula. He described the decision as xenophobic, saying “the feeling that my country does not trust me” hurt the most. ‘
A statement signed by more than 100 Asian Americans working in national security and diplomacy said on Thursday that the growing US focus on competition with China’s discrimination and blatant accusations of infidelity had worsened simply because of the way in which we look forward to it. ‘
The signatories note that “treating all Asian Americans working in national security with a broad suspicion, rather than considering us as valuable contributors, is counterproductive to the larger mission to secure the homeland.”
Top ranks are aware of discrimination
Foreign Minister Antony Blinken admitted during a Foreign Affairs Committee in the House on March 10 that he had been aware of complaints about discrimination for several years: ‘It was an issue that came up when I last served ‘, as deputy secretary from 2015 to 2017., he told the committee. Blinken added that he was “very concerned” about the issue and would discuss it as part of a broader overhaul aimed at increasing diversity within the department.
Although the State Department is required by law to provide Congress with the number and nature of the allocation restrictions and exclusions for the preceding three years, a State Department spokesman could not say how many diplomats across the department are currently subject to restrictions. .
The spokesman said the foreign ministry “does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, disability or age to determine whether it can access classified information, including all rulings on security clearance. Department also does not make assignment decisions based on protected characteristics. ”
However, the commitment to equality and fair treatment is not felt by a major Asian American diplomat. In a 2020 member survey by AAFAA, 70 percent of the 132 members who responded to it said they believed the department’s mandate limitation process was biased.
Thirty percent of respondents to the AAFAA survey noted that they have imposed allocation restrictions, including 52 percent of staff with family ties to China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Three out of four AAFAA members with restrictions said they did not provide reasoning for the decisions that apply to them. Of those who did get reasons, nearly half said they believe the decision includes factual errors.
The kind of mistakes made by diplomats in the outcome of the POLITICO survey included misrepresentations of immediate family members living in China, and restrictions imposed on parents born in China before the 1949 takeover of the Communists – and who fled rather than live among the communists. prevail.
The current approach “sends the false message that people who look like me are more disloyal,” says Lieu, who was born in Taipei, Taiwan and is a naturalized American citizen. Lieu criticized Carol Perez, then head of the foreign service and the global talent program, during a September 2020 hearing on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs because she could not set out the procedures of the department’s mandate restrictions.
Critics of the curtailment decisions note that there are many examples of Americans from minority groups – including Asian Americans – serving in countries with which they share commitments. The two most recent US ambassadors to Israel, David Friedman and Daniel Shapiro, are Jewish Americans. Ambassador Sung Kim, a Korean American, served as Ambassador to South Korea from 2011 to 2014. Kim is now acting assistant secretary for Asia Pacific Affairs – the department’s leading regional hand – and joined Blinken this week on his trip to Asia.
Lieu said the issue first came to his attention during preparations for a congressional delegation trip to China and Japan in 2015. Members of Congress were briefed by about a dozen diplomats, but ‘none of them were ‘not an Asian American’, and this caused problems. of both fairness and whether America limits its diplomatic capabilities, he said.
A broken appeal process
For years, there was no process at all for disputing assignment restrictions. Only in 2017, after Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) and then Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) Added language in the State Department’s Authorization Act to create a formal appeal process, a system for appealing decisions has come into effect.
However, Asian American diplomats tell POLITICO that the current system remains deeply flawed. They say that security officers – instead of third-party arbitrators – are responsible for reviewing their own initial decisions, and that there are no published figures on how many appeals succeed or not.
“While appreciating the department’s efforts to codify an appeal process,” AAFAA President Shirlene Yee wrote in a note to the new administration, “the appeal process is not independent of DS (Diplomatic Security),” which ‘many workers, disproportionate to Asians, leave American descent, still trapped in a cycle of premises to fight disloyalty. ‘
A bipartisan effort in Congress to strengthen the right of appeal is underway.
The State Authorization Act of 2021 – which seeks to revise the department’s operating guidelines for the first time in two decades and is supported by the leaders of both parties in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Reps Gregory Meeks (DN.Y.) and Michael McCaul. (R-Texas) – would give diplomats the right to hear and complete an independent revised appeal within 60 days,
Republican Foreign Ministry staff members told POLITICO that they sympathize with Asian American diplomats and want to see the State Department put its “most qualified people and the best Mandarin speakers” on China-related tasks. But Republican members remain hesitant about any changes that could pose new security risks.
Foreigners in their own country
The crux of the matter is that Asian Americans are still considered foreigners by many Americans, including their colleagues, several diplomats told POLITICO.
‘The United States is unique among countries, because no matter who you are or where you come from, you can be an American. “Too often, Asian Americans are constantly set aside as strangers and discriminated against as not entirely American, even at the US State Department,” Castro told POLITICO.
Yee shared the story of Yuki Kondo-Shah, who was informed just six weeks before leaving for a role in Japan that an assignment restriction could hinder her job. The department’s diplomatic security team cited her parent’s home country, the volunteer work done in Japan after the Fukushima disaster in 2011, and family visits as proof that she could not work on national security issues related to Japan, a close U.S. ally in East Asia.
Kondo-Shah successfully appealed the decision on her “foreign preference” to Japan and is now a US consulate in Fukuoka, Japan.
Another diplomat, the child of Chinese immigrants, anonymously testified in a report by the Truman Center on State Department reform that the security clearance process was structurally biased, punishing first- and second-generation Americans.
The diplomat said they had to wait three years until their security clearance started working at the department. ‘I reached out to more than a hundred people – including current and former ambassadors, diplomatic security personnel and my congressional representatives – to help expedite my security clearance, without the need for it. The Bureau of Diplomatic Security told me that only the US President can expedite my approval. ”
The diplomat added that due to the lack of transparent data, it is easy to dismiss the problem and view stories like mine as one-off anecdotes. But it is not. ‘