PiSigma
"the engineer"
I'm pretty sure you don't have an education in STEM. In engineering, any specialist, such as one that specializes in rare earth refining will be so specialist in that niche of a niche field, you need teams to work together to get refining to work.You do know that's a completely ineffective order. Plenty of Chinese will give up their Chinese citizenship in a heartbeat and accept US citizenship even if they have to "Break the law", including conducting IP theft on rare earth. US just has to pay them sizable amount. US is already paying LLM coders million dollar salaries, they can easily pay more for something so important to national security as rare earth.
Rare earth engineers in China are probably getting less than 50K per year in China. So, if they get a million dollar salary, they will happily conduct massive IP theft and just leave without a trace, never to come back.
This is the difference between China and the west. Even if China wants to pay an American a fortune, they will not give up their US citizenship and break American law. They will never adopt China as their permanent home. But because US has been a rich country for many decades and also the immigrant culture, other countries citizens find it extremely attractive to give up their existing life and move to US.
In an oil refinery, there are specialist for each unit, so to get crude to product, you will need specialists to design (teams of hundreds) then operate (teams of tens).
So poach a few people, they might know how to refine one or two elements... What about the rest? Do you know how to industrialize it? Or operate it? All very different skill sets. And this is what happens when the west deindustrialize, they become India. Think a few experts will solve their problems and tech transfer is easy.
And true experts will probably have their passports taken away or at least watched. You think people would just abandon wife and kids and parents for a chance to get shot in USA?