@Pwnallthethings@mastodon.social @scottpurdy@mastodon.world
To say that nationality is not relevant to ITAR is formally correct but meaningless. If you have non-US-nationals working for you, you then have to "apply for such authorization from
either the U.S. Department of State or the U.S. Department of Commerce, depending on
the item" for every single non-US-national employee, every single time you need them to look at anything covered under ITAR, which is a ludicrous list. No business can actually survive under such conditions, even Boeing with its giant office building full of regulatory compliance specialists across the fence from John Wayne Airport. So aerospace firms don't hire non-US-nationals if they can in any way avoid it.
In fact this has turned out to be a serious problem even for non-profit educational and scientific organizations, such as the Planetary Society, which had to register as an international arms dealer in order to send a small experiment to be added to a Russian Mars probe.
My preferred generic solution to this problem (which obviously doesn't cover 100% of situations) is to staple a Green Card to the back of every Master's and Doctorate diploma awarded in technical fields. As it is, the USA tells lots and lots of foreign students, "you can't stay here without a job, and the field we've just given you a world-class education in is too sensitive for us to allow you to work in, so back to your home country you go, and build up their industry to be a rival to ours, OK?"
