That just means that if you’re going to hire someone on a VISA you can’t discriminate which country they’re from.

I believe there is some protection against discriminating against greencards, but not visas

Recent green card holders, asylees, and refugees get federal protection, except when a law requires or permits otherwise. The other commenter’s company has a blanket rule of allowing none of these categories. Approximately this got SpaceX into trouble with the DOJ recently.

Some state or local laws offer additional protections beyond federal law, including NYC for all immigration statuses, except as required or allowed by other applicable laws. (So, for example, NYC doesn’t pretend that companies have to hire people who don’t already have employment authorization.)

Companies can chose to not sponsor visas. That’s not illegal.

True, but they aren’t allowing recently admitted permanent residents, asylees, and refugees, all of whom have federal protections against immigration status discrimination in employment.

Some places like NYC offer legal protections in this area to all categories of immigration status, of course within what applicable federal and state law requires and allows. Federal law allows preferring citizens over equally equalities noncitizens, requiring employment authorization to already exist, and complying with any specific legal requirements for restricting certain jobs to citizens. NYC law respects all of this. But overall NYC is totally allowed to, and does, add protections beyond federal law.

Late typo correction well beyond the edit window: “equally equalities” should have read “equally qualified”.

To be fair, he never said "every single role at your company requires a secret clearance." He has specifically mentioned that you can get by even without them. You have misquoted.

Obviously this company is a government contractor.

Not all government contracts require all employees working on the contract to have clearances or be US citizens.

I remember visiting a family member’s work (similar industry) and the front office did a screening of me as a visitor to make sure I met those same requirements before I could enter.

I’m guessing the contracts that make paper clips don’t need those stringent requirements, but the ones that make sensitive comms equipment do.

Large companies (think FAANG) can and do have non cleared, non citizen, non us persons (permanent residents, refugees and asylees) working on such projects with the proper separation of scopes, data access restrictions and so on.

One of my old managers has a story about how he was tasked with documenting an unspecified something for the US government. Because he was not a US citizen (though he was a citizen of a very close US ally), he was then no longer permitted to read the document that he wrote.

Probably just lawyers being lawyers, but still pretty funny.

But some do! And sounds like this is one of them.

It is required by law. Most likely through prohibitions for "exporting" defense technology, which can be very broad. "Exporting" can consist of having a casual conversation with a non-"US Person" or having a document visible on your desk.

"Secret" classification is really mild, about 5 million people have one.

>The law prohibits employers from hiring only U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents unless required to do so by law, regulation or government contract.

At these workplaces it will be a combination of all 3 of law, regulation, and government contract.

You are referring to ITAR. Under ITAR, permanent residents are considered US Persons and not subject to export controls. Clearance is a totally different thing that people often confuse with ITAR, which is only granted to US citizens, and though it is possible to grant something somewhat like clearance to non us citizens, it is almost never done.

Edit: Ah I see you are not disagreeing with what I said at all. Apologies, I cannot count the number of times I have seen in reddit and here, where people confuse ITAR with clearance.

I think it probably is illegal as well. My company had to settle a lawsuit with the DOJ recently for this reason.

Presumably government contract does mandate in this case.