This hits really close to me. I once lost a contract job as a computer technician at Northrop Grumman in late 1999, in the midst of the Wen Ho Lee "Chinese spying" scandal. The scandal was nonsense because Lee was a Taiwanese-American with no loyalty to mainland China, and my dismissal from the job - charging me with things I never did - was just as much of a nonsense. I was lucky to even qualify for unemployment insurance, and never worked in IT again.
My conclusion is that I was fired because I was seen as a "security threat" as an Asian, just like Lee himself. I had to work in many "US citizen only" areas, where security was of paramount importance. Of course, the federal government - the same bastards who made up the scandal - told me that I had no case.
I was so incensed that if Bill Richardson, the then-Energy Secretary under whose watch this whole thing happened, became Al Gore's running mate, I was going to vote for hated W. (This was before W caused two of my jobs to vanish.) In addition, I flew over to Amsterdam (on a free United Airlines ticket) with the intention of staying there illegally, but ended up coming back, when the Surinamese thugs proved Amsterdam to be a living hell, not the heaven of tolerance that it was made out to be.
The Washington Post article below, which I picked up from the Angry Asian Man blog, tells me that I am far from alone, and that employers, ranging from Best Buy to a Kia dealership, are still engaging in blatantly discriminatory practices.
Washington Post article
