by Matt Kennard
In July 2002, George W. Bush issued an executive order which shortened the period that non-citizen soldiers would have to wait for citizenship from the usual three years to just one. He greased the path to military service further by waiving naturalization fees and allowing recruits to take the oath of citizenship at US embassies and consulates abroad rather than in the US itself. The incentives worked. “We’ve had a record surge of applications,” said a spokesman for US Citizenship and Immigration Services, before lauding the ease with which immigrants could “apply for citizenship immediately, the day they are sworn in as members of the military.”12 In 2004, the US immigration agency started to conduct the first overseas military naturalization ceremonies since the Korean War. During 2005, 1,006 foreign-born soldiers became citizens outside the United States. As of May 2010, there were 16,966 non-citizens on active duty.13 For the Bush administration, it was the perfect solution: the introduction of more immigrants would kill two birds with one stone, “as a way to address a critical need for the Pentagon, while fully absorbing some of the roughly one million immigrants that enter the United States legally each year.”14 Instead of providing a sanctuary or granting them amnesty, the Bush administration would use service in the military as a bargaining chip. It worked: there has been an extraordinary increase in the number of immigrant soldiers who have gone on to become naturalized citizens. From 9/11 to the end of 2009, 52,000 foreign-born soldiers had become full-fledged US citizens, more than one hundred of them posthumously after being killed in combat.15 But while it served a purpose for the military, they weren’t overly kind in their treatment of the immigrant soldiers. There was an important proviso that a Green Card soldier who obtains US citizenship through service in the military can have that revoked if they receive an “other than honorable” discharge before completing five years of service. With the prevalence of drug and alcohol abuses—alongside the traumas of untreated PTSD—running through the service, this proviso was invoked widely and impacted countless immigrant families. After returning from the Middle East with their family’s futures in mind, some committed crimes and were put in jail, then, on release, deported. It sparked outrage among some lawmakers. Representative Bob Filner (D-CA), chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, was a proponent of changing this part of the law so that immigrants who had put themselves in danger in war could avoid deportation. “You come back from Iraq or Afghanistan today, you have put yourself on the line for this country,” said Filner. “An incredible number of kids come back with an injury or illness that puts them in trouble with the law. To simply have these people deported is not a good way to thank them for their service.”16 Dardar Paye was one of those who served the US proudly for many years, after coming to the country aged thirteen from the strife of Liberia. He joined the army in 1998 and went on to serve in the first Gulf War and then in Kosovo. In 2008, a decade after he signed up, he was convicted of six weapons-related offenses and went to federal prison. On being released, he faced deportation. “When I was in Kuwait, in Kosovo, I was like everyone else who was there, putting their lives on the line,” said Paye, who was an armored vehicle crewman in the army. “Now I feel like they just used me for what they wanted, and now they’re throwing me away.” (While waiting on his appeal, Paye was tragically murdered, his body found in the boot of a car with multiple gunshot wounds.) Everything had become much harder for immigrants with the passing of the 1996 Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which added crimes such as drug possession for sale to the list of serious offenses that could lead to deportation of a legal immigrant. “Drugs, anger management, weapons charges, that’s what a lot of vets are getting caught for, and there is no relief,” said Margaret Stock, a recently retired army reservist and immigration attorney who taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point. “The 1996 law really put the nails in their coffin,” she added.
Nightmare Act
On top of revoking citizenship once granted, the Bush administration was not short on ideas of how to send legal immigrants out to the desert in the first place. In 2007, the so-called Dream Act went before Congress, ostensibly as a way to provide immigrants with further means to citizenship, but, like all legislation in the period, including the No Child Left Behind Act, it had a military element. There was a crucial provision that would allow immigrants to achieve citizenship through either a two-year stint at a community college or military service for the same time period. With many immigrants unable to pay for the even the bare necessities, the chances of them being able to fork out for a two-year course seemed unlikely, as was the case for Gutierrez. Military service was the only other option. The Act also made extreme provisions for giving a Green Card to undocumented high-school students who agreed to serve in the military. It was eventually defeated in Congress, and then resubmitted without the community service option, before being defeated again in December 2010. The group Vamos Unidos, which represents Latino youth in the Bronx, New York, one of the main areas of recruitment activity, were particularly critical of the Dream Act’s provisions. “We demand that we return to our original DREAM ACT that had a community service option instead of a military one,” the group said. “The military has been losing their numbers due to the multiple wars the US has begun. The DREAM ACT would hand us over on a platter to fight these unjust wars. The DREAM ACT has been warped over the years to draft Latino youth into the military, as they need more and more soldiers to fight their wars.” The group called it a de facto draft.17 At the time, influential military analysts and think tanks were beginning to voice support for allowing any foreigners who wanted to enter the military to become Americans, in a full-scale “barbarization” of the military. (“Barbarization” is the term used to describe the later Roman military when it started allowing outsiders, or “barbarians,” to fight in their army.) “Now is the time to consider a new chapter in the annals of American immigration,” wrote two of the biggest enthusiasts, Max Boot and Michael O’Hanlon, in the Washington Post. “By inviting foreigners to join the U.S. armed forces in exchange for a promise of citizenship after a four-year tour of duty, we could continue to attract some of the world’s most enterprising, selfless and talented individuals.”18 Not only that, it would go some way to treating the problem of the millions of undocumented workers already in the US (and the million that enter every year)—a kind of amnesty with the caveat of military service. Who cares if they have to risk their lives to achieve their dream? In fact, Boot and O’Hanlon wanted to go even further: “We could provide a new path towards assimilation for undocumented immigrants who are already here but lack the prerequisite for enlistment—a green card. And we could solve the No. 1 problem facing the Army and Marine Corps: the fact that these services need to grow to meet current commitments yet cannot easily do so . . . given the current recruiting environment.” The de facto draft, in other words.
The cheerleaders for this new policy pointed to history for support (not Roman history, however). This kind of approach, they argued, had deep roots in the history of America’s armed forces, which was partially true. In one of the country’s most celebrated military victories—the Revolutionary War—German and French soldiers fought alongside the colonists to expel the British. In the Civil War about 20 percent of fighters were foreigners freshly arrived in the US, and English was “barely spoken” in some units. But that was 150 years ago. During the War on Terror, America was undergoing one of its most fervent anti-immigrant, jingoistic phases since the early 1980s, which didn’t sit too well with granting citizenship to thousands of immigrants. In November 2005 the Bush administration had announced it was to build a “virtual fence” along the Mexico–US border as part of a multibillion dollar effort to keep illegal immigrants out, incorporating a range of high-tech devices, including radar. The militarization of the Mexican border—likely pitting Mexican immigrants willing to serve against those trying to get across—went on unabated, while five years later, Arizona passed the most regressive
immigration laws since Jim Crow: obliging police to query the immigration status of people whom they suspect are in the US illegally—i.e. brown, Latino-looking people. Boot and O’Hanlon were aware of this surge of jingoism, but told the racists not to worry. Everyone one was a winner—apart from those like José Gutierrez. “Nativists need not fear that this would lead to a flood of foreigners,” they wrote. “Say we decide to recruit 50,000 foreigners a year for the next three years. That sounds like a lot, but it represents less than 10 percent of the total number coming to the United States anyway—and less than 10 percent of our active-duty armed forces. This would not radically change the demographics of our society or our military, but it would make a big difference in the size of the rotation base for our ongoing missions.” In other words, white people can still rule the roost and we get fodder for our wars of aggression. It also made sense money-wise. The CNA found that non-citizens were “far more likely” to complete their enlistment obligations successfully than their US-born comrades. “Non-citizen service members have a long track record of military success,” it noted. Thirty-six month attrition rates for non-citizens are between 9 and 20 percentage points lower than those for white citizens.19
Illegal Immigrants, Illegal Recruiters
Quietly, after the defeat of the Dream Act, something more insidious was passed in its stead: a law which gives the Pentagon power to bring immigrants into the US if it is deemed (in that beautiful piece of bureaucratic ambiguity) “vital to national security.” Although this law hasn’t been applied frequently, its has the potential to be widely used. The military had already started looking beyond the legal immigrants within its borders, casting its gaze to Mexico and the millions of desperately poor young men who dreamed of making it to the US. As early as 2003, the US embassy had to release a statement reiterating official policy that “undocumented or illegal immigrants cannot serve in the U.S. armed forces,” after a US military recruiter was found to have visited in a high school in Tijuana, Mexico.20 The recruiter had apparently turned up after following a conversation with two potential recruits. “The U.S. Army does not recruit here. We don’t endorse them coming here,” claimed a spokesman. But the Mexican newspaper Milenio called the sergeant’s efforts “an intense campaign to recruit young high school students.” Other local newspapers contended that the recruiter handed out promotional literature to students, claims denied by the US. In 2005, activists reported ads on Facebook that offered a Green Card in exchange for military service, highlighting the fact that the US military didn’t just want foreigners, it wanted young foreigners, perhaps to make up for all the retirees it was letting in. The young were also impressionable and full of romantic ideas about the American Dream. Within the US, it was a similar story—with recruiters bribing young illegal immigrants in the nation’s schools. Arlene Inouye, a high school teacher in the Los Angeles unified school district, said: “It’s well-known, common knowledge that military recruiters do promise or offer to our undocumented students fake Green Cards.” A student at the same school, Salvador Garcia III, added: “They offered they would bring my father back from Mexico if I served a four-year tour in the United States military.”21 In 2007, civil rights activist Ildefonso Ortiz Cabrera reported that while he was in Phoenix, Arizona, army recruiters suggested he go to a military base; he refused and instead returned to El Burrion, his town in Sinaloa, north Mexico.22 Not everyone was so strong-willed but we never heard about them—they ended up in the Middle East.
The promise of citizenship was a serious incentive. For many young Latinos this was the only shot for them and their family. In April 2008, Green Card holder Arturo Huerta-Cruz, twenty-three, of the Tenth Mountain Division, was on patrol near Tuz in northern Iraq, when he was killed by an IED. Huerta-Cruz was originally from a small rural town called Hidalgo, Mexico, but moved to Florida when he was ten. His motives for fighting were accurately outlined by the Tampa Bay Times, which said his death “will further opportunities for his younger cousins, including [his] baby Arturo, who is a U.S. citizen,” adding, “The infant child will have opportunities never available to Huerta-Cruz. He can vote for president; he might become president. He can work for the government—as Huerta-Cruz once hoped—or he might pass along his name to the family’s growing list of natural-born U.S. citizens.”23 The headline of the article was typical of the “patriotic foreigner” narrative the military and media pushed: “Mexican Citizen Died in Iraq Serving U.S., His Beloved New Land,” it read. But the American Dream had started to look very different during the War on Terror: it was no longer affluent suburban life in Middle America, but indigent war life in the Middle East. Sergeant Ernesto Hernandez, twenty-six, a Mexican from Temple, Texas, saw the military as the only way out of working in dead-end job with the threat of deportation. His fear, he said, was forever “working at Wal-Mart, changing oil or working at McDonalds.” Hernandez became a vehicle mechanic for the 101st Airborne, and was deployed to Kuwait soon after. “It’s not a bad deal,” Hernandez said. “Especially with everybody speaking English, you pick it up like that.”24 Despite all this testimony of desperation, the military claimed that the granting of citizenship was not among the main reasons for immigrant enlistment. “Money for education, wanting to serve the country, and to learn a skill are the top three motivations,” said Douglas Smith, Public Affairs Officer at the US Army Recruiting Command, contradicting everything the recruits were actually saying.25
On top of this the military claimed immigrants were actually better soldiers because they had a better understanding of American democracy and freedoms than those born in the country. It was a desperate attempt to put a positive spin on the “barbarization” of the military. “In many cases, they have a personal experience from living in an area where they didn’t have that freedom and liberty,” said Lieutenant Colonel Keith Pickens, chief of staff for the division rear command of the 101st Airborne. “They’re a lot closer to the American founding fathers than the average American might be,” he added.26 It was the same rhetoric that accompanied the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: foreigners can only grasp freedom when they see American bombs. Some of the soldiers might have realized that in their native countries—including Guatemala, among many others—democracy had been repressed by the US government. But the patronizing tone continued. Military leaders lauded the “cultural sensitivity” of foreigners—compared to the high levels of chauvinism among the regular troops anyway. “The American Army finds itself in a lot of different countries where cultural awareness is critical,” said Lieutenant General Benjamin C. Freakley, the top recruitment officer for the army. The CNA added, “Legal permanent residents, or green card holders, are more racially, ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse than citizen recruits. This is valuable on many levels, particularly at a time when the military is addressing the challenges of fighting terrorism.”27 But this new love for multiculturalism and diversity had its drawbacks. In the case of José Gutierrez, it can be argued that his lack of English contributed to his death. “He was holding security on one building, as they picked up he was on other side of building,” said his platoon sergeant. “He didn’t hear the verbal command . . . to get up and move.”28 Or he didn’t understand it.
Life Is Cheap
The move to get foreigners to fight America’s wars was controversial among immigrant groups, as it was essentially an extension of the already lopsided ethnic demographics of the US military during the War on Terror, in which minorities were disproportionately enlisted. It had unnerving echoes of the Vietnam War, where black soldiers were asked to fight to “defend” a democracy in which they had few rights: the new battalions of Green Card soldiers were fighting the same fight. Foreigners’ lives are cheap—that is traditional imperial ideology, so it was clear quite early on that these recruits would not be stuck biting their fingernails at US bases for long. Many were sent straight into combat with no other option. The situation was made worse by a strange 2009 report from the Rand Corporation which fou
nd that Latinos were actually underrepresented in the US military. This increased efforts to find a way to get more of them in.29 “For us, that’s a huge problem. Mainly because in the invasion in 2003 in Iraq, 20 percent of the casualties in the invasion were Latino,” said Marco Amador, a filmmaker.30 But only 15.1 percent of the US population are Latino: if they are underrepresented in the military, how can 20 percent of those killed be Latino? The obvious answer is they are assigned more dangerous missions while on active duty. The charge that Green Card soldiers were merely cannon fodder looked uncomfortably true. For many in the immigrant communities it was the final straw as their communities had been gradually degraded by criminalization and deportations. “We have grown up with the trauma of having our family members and friends detained, jailed, and deported. But we are strong and determined, so we keep onwards,” said one Latino rights group.31 The reaction was similar to that of the parents who were fighting the militarization of childhood and education—the militarization of immigration was being equally resisted. A strange ideological alliance was spawned in opposition as immigrants’ rights groups concerned with the blackmail received support from the anti-immigrant right-wing wary of a “flood” of immigration. It’s “another example of the exploitation of cheap labor,” said Jorge Mariscal, Vietnam veteran and professor of Latino studies at the University of California, San Diego.32 It was another way to replicate the injustices of wider American society in its fighting force. “This is what the US military has always done. This is nothing new. They use the Latino community or the poor working class community in this country as their cannon fodder,” added Amador.33 Then there were the right-wing arguments. “We should go to any length to avoid developing a kind of mercenary army, made up of foreigners loyal to their units and commanders but not to the republic,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which aims to bring down immigration, wrote in the conservative National Review. “It didn’t work out well for the Romans.”34 He felt the profession would be sullied by the involvement of too many foreigners, putting American citizens off serving, similar way to the way Americans don’t want to work fruit-picking. “If enlisting were a way to get legalized or a way to get into the United States,” he continued later, “soldiering would become a job Americans would not do very rapidly.”35 There were frequent charges that Green Card soldiers were merely mercenaries, whose loyalty to the US military and the country more generally made them a risk. Recruiting a large number of non-citizens could change the main purpose of the military from that of defending the country to being “a way to get a foot in the door of the United States,” the argument went. Those same critics didn’t seem to mind the multiple private security firms who were populating the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq (and other parts of the world); firms whose soldiers were literally mercenaries being paid private salaries without any government oversight, free from the legal constraints on normal US soldiers.