Cato released my new policy analysis about espionage and immigration. It is the culmination of many months worth of original research to meticulously document and quantify every espionage and espionage-related criminal conviction in the United States from 1990–2019 – including those convicted of economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, and other related commercial crimes. Although my goal was to find each one, I undoubtedly missed a few, but the sample provided here is still large enough for analysis. Espionage is a serious issue that impacts American national security and that frequently infringes upon the property rights of Americans. Countering this threat in an efficient manner is an important job of the government. The information in my analysis will help the government formulate more efficient counter espionage policies, should it wish to do so.

My research is an advancement over earlier databases of espionage that include only those spies who targeted the U.S. government. However, modern concerns about espionage from China are more focused on theft of commercial secrets as part of an “economic blitzkrieg,” according to former attorney general Bill Barr. My analysis also focuses on spies who committed their crimes on U.S. soil, so it doesn’t include hacks from abroad or other espionage that occurred overseas. My analysis also has information about the specific criminal violations, countries of benefit, countries of origin, immigration statuses, ethnicity, and other information about the spies that can be downloaded here.

My analysis identified 1,485 spies on American soil who, from 1990 through the end of 2019, conducted espionage against the U.S. government or commercial espionage against private organizations and individuals. Of those, 890 were foreign-born, 583 were native-born Americans, and 12 had unknown origins. The chance that a native-born American committed espionage and was identified was about 1 in 13.1 million per year from 1990 to 2019. The annual chance that a foreign-born person in the United States committed espionage and was discovered was about 1 in 2.2 million. The government was the victim in 83.3 percent of espionage cases, firms were the victims of commercial espionage in 16.3 percent of the cases, and hospitals and universities were the victims of espionage in 0.1 percent and 0.3 percent of the cases, respectively.

About 54.9 percent of all the people convicted had violated the Arms Export Control Act (AECA), a law that makes it illegal to export arms, ammunition, and other defense articles without a permit. Many of the people convicted of AECA violations were probably not spies. However, some of the people convicted of AECA violations were almost certainly spies, such as Kan Chen, John Reece Roth, and Mozaffar Khazaee. Chen exported to attempted to export 180 export-controlled military items to China. Roth exported data on specialized plasma technology for use in drones that he had developed under a U.S. Air Force contract while he was a professor at the University of Tennessee. Khazaee, an Iranian-born U.S. citizen, attempted to export to Iran proprietary material about military jet engines and the U.S. Air Force’s F‑35 Joint Strike Fighter program that he had illegally gathered from his employer.

The cases of Chen, Roth, and Khazaee were the exceptions as most of the AECA violators likely benefited criminal organizations and drug cartels in Latin America as well as insurgents in the Middle East, South America, and elsewhere. Unfortunately, the specific beneficiaries aren’t always known in these cases so I included them all lest I be accused of cherry picking. After all, it’s better to error on the side of overestimating the threat of espionage in this type of novel analysis than underestimating it. The other criminal violations such as economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, being an unregistered agent of a foreign government, or being convicted of false statements, tax fraud and visa fraud in the course of an anti-espionage investigation, and other violations were all easier to identify.

There are three main reasons why I conducted this research. The first is that many future policy issues will be in response to the United States’ growing geopolitical conflict with China based on the numerous bills introduced, administrative actions, and statements by political appointees. Second, there is almost no data on estimated espionage levels. The arguments on both sides rely almost entirely on scary anecdotes. Policy making by data is almost always bad, but generally better than policy making by anecdote. One hope is that my research will improve the policy debate. Third, I want to understand reality. Protecting national security is a good reason to impose targeted immigration restrictions if potential security benefits are greater than the potential costs, reasonably estimated. Since nobody had done that work yet, the task fell to me.

One surprising finding is that many of the cases have no clear nexus to national security. They are crimes, to be sure, but the national security component is missing from many of them. When it comes to Chinese-born spies prosecuted, they stole commercial secrets or intellectual property in two-thirds of the cases and they were rarely related to national security. For instance, Chinese immigrants Li Chen and Yu Zhou conspired to steal research as part of their jobs as pediatric cancer researchers. They wanted to establish a firm in China. Xiaorong You, a Chinese immigrant, was indicted for stealing a chemical formula for a new type of coating for the inside of Coca-Cola cans that was intended to better preserve flavor. Chinese-born Xudong “William” Yao was convicted of stealing secrets related to operating train locomotives. James Patrick Lewis, a native-born American professor at West Virginia University, was convicted of fraud because he lied about his involvement with a Chinese program that may be tied to economic espionage. That’s just a small selection of the individuals involved, but many of them are similar and have no national security aspect.

The growing geopolitical conflict with China is going to impact many American policies. Hopefully, this Cato analysis will inform the debate and give policy makers the tools to craft better laws and regulations that address actual problems rather than scary non-representative anecdotes.