One wonders just what Justice was thinking when they filed that suit…
They were concerned SpaceX was violating labor laws. 0th order, one could interpret SX rejecting asylees and refugees as discrimination. (And after the fact, 0th order, its not the best look that the one asylee they hired was after DOJ started investigating.)
SX's "we're only going to hire US persons because we build rockets and so there's ITAR and stuff" isn't airtight, as every other space industry company in the US employs foreign nationals because not every position within a company falls under controlled categories. Compartmentalization of open technology vs EAR vs ITAR within a company is a well solved problem; SX has this compartmentalization implemented because...they need to anyway.
So then the question is why were these specific people rejected? If it was merit based, (or even, was the position recently filled with someone already?) no problem.
FWIW it wouldn't be a surprise if SX was indeed misinterpreting export control law relative to hiring (in other words, not in a maliciously discriminatory way, as I suspect some folks are assuming is the accusation). The space industry has historically been WAY conservative with controlled tech and SX is no different. It’s far easier to just put the ITAR stamp on the document template than actually evaluate the content within every document before stamping; it’s easy to imagine porting that approach over to hiring.
Anyway, What we're likely talking about here are pretty low level jobs. Stuff that's a step above contracted services (janitorial, etc.) but not deeply technical. Is it some weirdo trying to make a buck? Maybe. Could that weirdo actually have a case? Also maybe.
While of course playing the slippery slope card can often itself be a slippery slope, there's a) potential precedent that's being set regarding hiring discrimination (that could extend beyond the presumably infinitesimal asylee/refugee pool) and b) potential that malicious discrimination rejection is being masked. (Eg, are you round-filing that CV because the person isn't a US person or is it really because they're Muslim?).
It's certainly easy to make an uniformed broad brush of "SpaceX Haters Gonna Hate" on this one; reality is not quite so binary.
