And what difference does it make if they're native or naturalized? One of the bedrock principles of American democracy is (or at least is supposed to be) that a citizen is a citizen. There's a reason that the phrase "second-class citizen" is supposed to have universally pejorative connotations.

Clearances aren't democratic (nor should they be).

No idea how they can tell citizen status from the name, though. I thought the US was made up of people form all over earth with all kinds of backgrounds so one couldn't tell from their name.

But what does any of this have to do with anything anyway? The linked-to page doesn't mention the NSA, P0 team, or security clearances.

Second: My intent was to reply to Kiddico's message which says "I find it interesting how many of those are attributed to project zero members" That's the relation of p0 with my reply

Third: Ben Hawkes(NZ), Tavis Ormandy(UK), Ian Beer(UK) and Matt Tate(UK) are often credited as notable members of the project zero team.

Why are you playing dumb? He's clearly talking about someone with clearly foreign name, not someone from Canada.

I'm sick of people acting willfully ignorant in their arguments

The student visa should lead to a green card. Since it does not immigrants go back to their home nation and do startups there.

Not to be political, but Trump does not get that yet.

Look at the census of the 100 most common American names, they're either traditional American names or Spanish names from those who immigrated here over the last 50 years. https://www.thoughtco.com/most-common-us-surnames-1422656

That means that 80% of the US population has a surname other than those on that list. Assuming that 80% of the US poplulation are "foreign" because they aren't in the top 100 most common surnames, seems rather foolish.

What exactly is a native born American name to you? English origin? German? I honestly think you should be ashamed of what you wrote. It's deeply offensive to those of us with roots in other places.

"Surname from the Baltic States" implies linguistic precision and specificity that "surname from the United States" does not convey and is in no means equivalent to. There is some vagueness in what I said but I left it there intentionally, people don't get crazy specific about personal details here usually. I was meaning to say I have a "foreign" surname.

For instance, I remember from History class that there were atleast 3 famous guys from the 1700s named "John Smith"

Since you're interested in around 1850, around there starts immigration from places like Ireland, Italy, Poland.. even a few Baltic people.

They were Mexican by that point, right?

Then of course much later there was the war with Spain which resulted in caribbean US territories... This is becoming a big tangent though.

No matter what you think, the British Isles are the ones who populated the country.

"German-Americans are America’s largest single ethnic group .... In 2013, according to the Census bureau, 46m Americans claimed German ancestry: more than the number who traced their roots to Ireland (33m) or England (25m). "

https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21642222-americ...

Lots of people of other origins adopted English surnames because the British were the dominant early group, and then later people with British names were, even though not always of British descent.

So, now, sure, British surnames are dominant, but that's often not indicative of British descent.

How do you know?

> Even with dual citizenship they won't get clearance easily to work for NSA.

Not being a native citizen doesn't mean you are a dual citizen; those are orthogonal concepts. Dual citizenship are frequently native-born (having citizenship-by-birth in more than one country is a common route to dual citizenship) and naturalized citizens often do not retain foreign citizenship (they formally must renounce it, but some countries don't automatically—or ever—give effect to such renunciation.)