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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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In my experience, the primary differences in hiring for defense versus general tech is that the defense hiring leads with "Are you a US citizen?", possibly followed by "Are you willing and able to acquire and maintain a clearance?". Civil hiring lacks a bona fide reason to ask about citizenship and tends instead to ask if you'll need a work visa: they don't want to know if you're a citizen or permanent resident (green card). In both cases anything beyond those questions is generally forbidden.

There are plenty of (American citizen) workers in defense with "foreign-sounding" names. The security process is rather opaque, but even naturalized citizens can do sensitive work. See the Lockheed pride socks meme if you think the hiring preferences aren't similar, although the resulting demographics are different largely because they've removed all green card and H1B applicants from the system.

That said, I've definitely seen cases where heuristics have been applied to double check whether, say, a candidate with a degree from a non-US institution correctly marked their visa or citizenship status.

In fact, many defense companies will higher non-citizens too, for work not requiring actual clearance: note that ITAR regulations, for example, apply to exports to non-“US persons”, and a permanent resident is a “US person”. Thus, a permanent resident can work on ITAR/EAR controlled stuff just fine.