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Home Front: WoT
US military to recruit immigrants, offer citizenship
2009-02-16
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon will begin recruiting skilled immigrants with temporary status in the United States and offer them an express path to citizenship, The New York Times reported Sunday. Citing military officials, the paper said that under the proposed program, recruits would be able to become US citizens in as little as six months.

Permanent residents, or holders of so-called "green cards," have been eligible to enlist in the US military for a long time. But for the first time since the Vietnam War, the military, which is stretched thin due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will now open its doors to immigrants with temporary visas if they have lived in the United States for a minimum of two years, the report said.

Recruiters expect that temporary immigrants will have more education, foreign language skills and professional expertise than many Americans, helping the military to fill vacancies in medical care, language interpretation and field intelligence analysis, The Times wrote.

"The American Army finds itself in a lot of different countries where cultural awareness is critical," Lieutenant General Benjamin Freakley, the top recruitment officer for the army, told the paper. "There will be some very talented folks in this group," he said.

The program will be first limited to 1,000 enlistees nationwide in its first year and mostly involve the army, the report said. If the pilot program succeeds, it will expand for all branches of the military and eventually provide as many as 14,000 volunteers a year, or about one in six recruits, The Times noted.
Posted by:Steve White

#16  Jeez, look at the early days of the Republic and seem how many foreigners were serving : the Marquis de Lafayette, von Steuben, Count Pulaski, etc. The US has always had foreigners in the military and they have serve honorably in the main. This is just NYT propaganda about how we are "desperate" for troops because of the "unpopular and illegal" wars.
Posted by: Shieldwolf   2009-02-16 19:36  

#15  #12 - Alex - contact your area congressman, and if that doesn't help, contact mine: Duncan D Hunter. He's USMC and Marine Reserve
Posted by: Frank G   2009-02-16 18:53  

#14  As for immigrants serving in the US military, I have just two words: Rick Rescorla
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia   2009-02-16 17:57  

#13  Just as long as the military keep the case of Ali Mohammed and the post below "War and Peace and Deceit in Islam" in opinion, in mind and not mindlessly follow process as opposed to outcome.
Posted by: tipper   2009-02-16 15:28  

#12  Unless of course your an ex British Soldier who now lives in the US and who wanted to join the Marine Corp and was told that the UK was not in this new program so good luck to the US military machine with all your new Indian,Pakistan,Somali recruits sure Al qaeda will be well happy with the US training all their martyrs
Posted by: Alex   2009-02-16 15:26  

#11  We had two "foreigners" in my basic training flight in 1965. One was German, the other was Canadian. Philippinos had the "right" to enlist in our military after the Philippines gained their independence in 1946. I've known dozens of "foreigners" in the military during my 26-year career. Most had joined to gain their citizenship, and to serve a nation they loved and respected. This is NOT "new". This is the first time, however, I've known the US military to actually go LOOKING for these types of recruits.

My granddaughter has enlisted in the Navy recently, but there's not an opening in "boot camp" until May or June a the earliest. That doesn't suggest there's a huge demand for these people.
Posted by: Old Patriot   2009-02-16 14:35  

#10  Earning citizenship by placing one's life on the line in service to the nation seems honourable to me.

This assumes a 4 year enlistment successfully completed, as well as background checks.
Posted by: Lagom   2009-02-16 13:10  

#9  This sounds like "a solution in search of a problem".

The armed forces currently are meeting their recruiting goals, and quality of the recruits is as high as its ever been.

The only reason to do this is if we need to expand our forces quickly or are experiencing a shortage of specific skills (e.g. nurses).
Posted by: Frozen Al   2009-02-16 12:55  

#8  the US needs to allow more immigrants to enter the US legally

You think we need millions, billions, of third world people streaming into this country? Bringing all their third world problems with them? I don't.

You think we need masses of poor, illiterate Mexican peasants to serve as cannon fodder for the US Army? I hope not.

OTOH, if you have a few thousand legal immigrants who are educated and show some inclination to assimilate into our culture it might work. Er, that is, if you don't mind being compared to the French.

The United States produces hundreds of thousands of new, low-skilled jobs every year, and the number of Americans ready and willing to fill those jobs steadily decreases with every year

Oh yeah? Just wait until GM goes belly up.
Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305   2009-02-16 12:55  

#7  Mexican drug loads happy that we will train their soldiers.
Posted by: bman   2009-02-16 11:01  

#6  Romans did it---not long before the end.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2009-02-16 10:55  

#5  Not that sure about illegal aliens. Would you want to share a foxhole with someone who thinks so little about violating our borders?
Posted by: CrazyFool   2009-02-16 09:15  

#4  Again, this goes to the idea of creating an American Foreign Legion, modeled after the FFL. Quartered offshore, this would let us recruit the best foreign talent, as light infantry to do the long-term, low value, high cost missions like peacekeeping and humanitarian relief.

The US military is a very expensive, finely tuned and superb machine, and using it for missions like these wastes billions of dollars and degrades its readiness. Like using a samurai sword to pry open cans of paint.

Since the US has large numbers of illegal aliens, we might as well push for them to buy their citizenship as well, if nothing else than to get citizenship for "good" illegals. But many possible soldiers don't *want* US citizenship, they want to be soldiers.

The illegals are good for just raising US military numbers. But for serious, if low grade missions, the military needs an AFL.
Posted by: Anonymoose   2009-02-16 09:00  

#3  .....temporary immigrants will have more education, foreign language skills and professional expertise than many stinking Bible and gun toting white, Republican voting Americans, helping the military to fill vacancies in medical care, language interpretation and field intelligence analysis, The Times wrote.

Can we not find the funding to TRAIN a 14,000 willing US citizens? Appears we're kicking the multi-cult thing up a notch.
Posted by: Besoeker   2009-02-16 08:52  

#2  This seems like a it could be a step in the right direction, closer towards a realistic solution to the problem of illegal immigration, in the sense that it would increase the number of immigrants allowed into the US legally. However, this does not appear to do much about the root cause of this problem, which is the abhorrent failure of the current path to citizenship, which is terribly unrealistic and inefficient, and it is addressing the wrong class of immigrants.

This could give our military invaluable resources, and it does seem like a very effective and fair way to create a path to citizenship, requiring a needed public service in exchange for the right to live under the protections of US law. According to the Cato Institute (unfortunately, this analysis is from pre-economic crisis times, so it is possible the situation may have changed), the US needs to allow more immigrants to enter the US legally. This would stem the tide of illegal entry and would address many of the problems commonly associated with illegal immigration, such as wage decline (although the connection here is actually much more tenuous than often thought) and job-loss.

However, there is a necessary distinction between "skilled" and "un-skilled" or "low-skilled" immigrants. Though this may sound counter-intuitive to some, we need immigrants in the US, but not "skilled" (or more accurately, "professional" immigrants). The United States produces hundreds of thousands of new, low-skilled jobs every year, and the number of Americans ready and willing to fill those jobs steadily decreases with every year (Again, this is pre-financial crisis, so I do not know how this data may have changed, if at all). Illegal immigrants (which are almost entirely composed of "low-skilled" workers) are a resource that we have all but institutionalized, and a resource that would better serve the US if we simply adjusted our legal paths to citizenship to be efficient and more in-tune with the reality of the US workforce.

This plan may open us up to such a realistic approach to immigration policy, but it seems to be following the same precendent we have followed for years: whenever we increase the number of immigrants allowed into the US, we allow in more skilled immigrants (H1B), which we often have adequate alternatives for, and eschew the low-skilled immigrants, which come in anyway, just without the legal protections that would reduce the burden placed on wages, jobs, and social services (In way of example, many illegal immigrants opt against preventative care and wait until they -must- get medical care, for fear of being deported. This results in more severe, and expensive, problems than would otherwise occur, which these immigrants care often not pay for.).

For now, we shall simply have to wait and see.
Posted by: FTWilliams   2009-02-16 08:33  

#1  How about giving DoD some of those H1B visas now that the economy doesn't really need those hundreds of thousands foreigners businesses lied cried they desperately needed [and thus kill the incentive of any American to go into that specific field of endeavor for study or work]?
Posted by: Procopius2k   2009-02-16 07:02  

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