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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

> The team also conducted a survey in 2021–2022 of nearly 1400 Chinese Americans in tenured or tenure-track positions at US universities that revealed that 35% of them feel unwelcome, and 72% do not feel safe.

> Furthermore, 42% are fearful of conducting research in the US, 65% are worried about pursuing collaborations with China and 86% perceive that it is harder to recruit top international students now compared with five years ago. Of the survey respondents who have obtained US federal grants 45% say that they will avoid applying for such awards for fear of making mistakes in the application process that could lead to them being investigated.

So...what % of white American scientists would leave a European country in which they did probably not feel safe, perhaps felt unwelcome, etc., etc.?

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What the US did with NSF grant fraud prosecutions is unconscionable and a terrible unforced error.

What’s an example of a European country where a white American would feel unsafe? I’m having trouble processing the comparison.

Trivial answer: Russia

But my point was that Chinese-descent scientists in America might be rational human beings, making decision about where to live and work based on their perceptions of the risks, costs & benefits. Not some "tired, poor, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free" out of a simplistic American Patriotism story.

"European"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe#Contemporary_definition

(Vs. one of the older definitions amounted to "good Catholics like us, not those Eastern Orthodox heretics". I'll guess that later definitions included "whites who are not Slavs", and "on our side of the Iron Curtain".)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia#History

Neither Russia's "just look at that (Mercator projection) map!" geographic dominance by Siberian tundra and subarctic land, nor Russia's current economic dependence on the West Siberian petroleum basin make it a non-European country.

That’s fair. I don’t generally think of Russia when people say Europe, but historically it is (at least the parts that are in control politically). If someone in the US says “I’m taking a vacation in Europe” and I ask “oh which cities are you visiting” and they say “Moscow”, I would be pretty surprised, but that doesn’t make it not Europe.

I’d also be curious if you have a less trivial example, since it sounded like you had multiple in mind with the generalization and I’m not sure which countries I should be avoiding (I didn’t know about any).

On a side note it blows my mind that the Russians weren’t brought into the fold after the USSR collapsed. Incredible missed opportunity for peace.

Agree the Chinese here may be doing the rational thing. I think people in the west have an exaggerated view of how bad China is for Chinese. Culturally we are offended by a lot of the government practices, but not everyone has the same culture (of course).

> I'd be curious...you had multiple in mind...

Ireland between the Easter Rising and...um...maybe the Irish Republic leaving the British Commonwealth? 1930's Germany and Italy. Spain under Franco. Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Greece under the junta. Yugoslavia when US/NATO bombs were falling in the '90's. Etc., etc., ...

( One Europe / China tie-in here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_bombing_of_the_C... )

Sorry, but I have no particular insight on which European countries a prudent American traveler should be avoiding right now.

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