This has been going on since the 1980s.
Academia was the beachhead of the Chinese invasion of our country and they have done a long march through our institutions ever since
The Chinese were all too happy to seed fully funded students and researchers into our most strategically important research programs. And everyone in academia was more than happy to take their money and their students many of whom, BTW , were some of the most brilliant people I have met
The Chinese rapidly discovered just how cheaply and easily academics and academia could be bought off.
Absolutely. It's an easy way to stretch research funding, and if you don't do it the labs you compete with will. This is one reason why I think that anyone doing research being paid for by an NIH or NSA grant should be precluded from hiring non-Americans to work on those projects. These are taxpayer funded grants and should not be used to fund research being done by non-Americans.
We are using American dollars to fund the education, training, and advancement of non-Americans, while the subsidization of these non-Americans by their governments drives down pay for American post-docs.
Further, many of these people get green cards, stay in the US and compete for US grants, for which they then hire non-Americans to work on. They also make their way onto NIH and/or NSA grant review committees and favor the applications of other non-Americans from their countries of origin.
The motivation for American citizens to go into science has been eroding for many years, and all of this contributes.