interesting concern, because SpaceX has a lot of military secrecy and corporate espionage concerns… new refugees with ready-to-use desirable technology skills are pretty much a standard cover technique to get a spy inserted into your organization.
ITAR only requires that employees be a US person (so green card at least). But yeah it’s a rough call because of that.
True, though presumably they also have staff who have nothing to do with that end of things, and who’d be firewalled from it no matter where they come from?
And, though a majority of refugees might not be possible to vet to the degree necessary for security clearance, this is not true for all of them. Some will have held positions in the US working on highly sensitive matters, others may have worked alongside US military or CIA before they came to the US.
To bring a case before a court, the DOJ would have to be able to show that applicants for jobs at SpaceX were being discriminated against by virtue of their refugee status. If it can be shown that the applicants in question were rejected for some valid reason (such as inability to vet them for a role where that is necessary or just desirable), they’d have no case.