I do so hate these reports:
U.S. spy agencies need to recruit more racial and ethnic minorities, especially first-generation Americans whose language skills and cultural backgrounds could help fill critical gaps in knowledge and analysis, two top intelligence officials said. […]
“Nothing is more important to the intelligence profession than cultivating different perspectives on the foreign threats and challenges facing our nation,” he said Monday at a border security conference. He said that agencies need workers “of diverse ethnic backgrounds, with different languages and cultural backgrounds,” to collect and analyze information on threats to national security.
The problem of course shows up in the translation between idea and practice:
Rodriguez told an audience of government and law enforcement officials and security contractors that diversity is not just the “politically correct thing to say” but also an important means of protecting against group-think.
Accomplishing that mission actually requires hiring for diversity of thought, mind and opinion. There is not necessarily a direct correlation between these factors and race (your author offers himself up as just one example). In practice however the process quickly devolves into hiring ethnicities for the sake of broadening the color palette. Take note of the make-up of a large number of IC CAE schools; do you think they had intel programs that were just languishing in obscurity until IC CAE recognized them?
As I have stated before: people in the IC want to work with the best regardless of what they look like or where they came from.
Oh, and by the way, the most likely people to get rejected on security grounds? The very first-generation Americans that are in the greatest demand. A recruiting push absent a fix in that process is just setting people up for disappointment and disillusionment.
