COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Youth of Color
If you're an immigrant, at least Uncle Sam wants you
Deborah Davis, MetroActive
September 19, 2007
JESUS was an easy mark for the recruiter. He was a boy who fantasizedthat by joining the powerful, heroic U.S. Marines, he could help his
own country fight drug lords. He gave the recruiter his address and
phone number in Mexico, and the recruiter called him twice a week for
the next two years until he had talked Jesus into convincing his
parents to move to California.
Fernando and Rose Suarez sold their home and their laundry business
and immigrated with their children. Jesus enrolled at a high school
known for academic achievement. But the recruiter wanted him to
transfer to a school for problem teenagers, since its requirements
for graduation were lower, and Jesus would be able to finish sooner.
He was 17 1/2 when he graduated from that school, still too young to
enlist on his own, so his father co-signed the enlistment form, as
the military requires for underage recruits.
Three years later, at the age of 20, his body was torn apart in Iraq
by an American-made fragmentation grenade during the first week of
the invasion. In the Pentagon's official Iraq casualty database, his
death is number 74. Now Jesus is in a cemetery, and his parents, who
blame each other for his death, are painfully and bitterly divorced.
While his mother bears her loss as a private tragedy, Fernando, who
has dual Mexican and American citizenship, is working tirelessly to
protect other young immigrants from being manipulated by U.S.
military recruiters-- the way he wishes he had protected his son. In
the Iraq war, citizenship is being used as a recruiting tool aimed
specifically at young immigrants, who are told that by enlisting they
will be able to quickly get citizenship for themselves (sometimes
true: it depends on what the Immigration and Customs Enforcement
branch of the Department of Homeland Security finds) and their entire
families (not true: each family member has to go through a separate
application process). Nevertheless, with the political pressures on
Latino families growing daily under this administration, many young
Latinos are unable to resist the offer, which immigrants' rights
activists see as blatant exploitation of a vulnerable population.
Barrio Anthro
Jesus, like the large majority of new military recruits, was signed
up through the Delayed Entry Program (DEP), which operates in high
schools, GED programs and home-schooling networks across the nation.
The well-crafted messages on the DEP website have been in development
ever since the draft ended and the all-volunteer military was
initiated after Vietnam.
The DEP's persuasion campaigns originally targeted black teenagers
with the message that military service equaled jobs that promised
fair treatment regardless of race. Recruiters were able to easily
meet their quotas until the early '80s, when enlistment rates of
young African Americans began to decline and the rates for Latinos
began to rise for reasons the military did not understand.
Over the next decade, the military commissioned a number of studies
on the relationship between race and ethnicity and the "propensity to
enlist." For example, the Youth Attitude Tracking Survey, conducted
between 1975 and 1999 and published by the Defense Technical
Information Center, found a correlation between the rising
educational achievement of blacks and lower enlistment rates, and
between the low educational achievement of Latinos (particularly if
their first language was not English) and rising enlistment rates.
As Latinos became a more important source of recruits, the Pentagon
hired market-research firms to design advertising campaigns that
addressed the issues they care most about: family pride, education
and citizenship. Today, the Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force
recruitment campaigns focus largely on education and benefits to
families. The Army's campaign, created by Cartel Impacto, a
cutting-edge firm from San Antonio, Texas, uses the firm's
proprietary "barrio anthropology" and grassroots "viral and guerrilla
marketing" techniques to "go deep into the neighborhoods and barrios"
in order to tell Latino families how the military can help them have
the kind of life they want in America. "We address the core issues of
why they left their country in the first place," says a Cartel
Impacto spokeswoman, who did not want her name published. "You have
to conduct your outreach carefully," she says, "using PTAs as an
entry point," as well as "local Hispanic groups that the newly
arrived would look to."
Recruit Friends!
These marketing campaigns support the work of recruiters who, as
mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act, must have free access to
students in every one of the country's public schools. Recruiters
operating in high schools try to get children as young as 14 to sign
up for the military's DEP, which allows them to finish high school
before going on active duty. Under the program, these young "men and
women," as recruiters are trained to call them, are targeted, tested,
gifted, video-gamed, recruitment- faired and career-counseled into
enlisting before they turn 18. They are also paid $2,000 for every
friend they talk into signing up with them and, until recently, were
paid $50 for every name they brought in to a recruiter. In addition
to cash, students who help recruiters to enlist their friends are
promoted to a higher military rank, from Private E-1 to Private E-2,
even before they are out of high school. The rewards are commensurate
with the quality of the friends they recruit, as measured by their
friends' ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) scores.
"You will get promoted to Private E-2," promises the DEP website, if
your referrals lead to the enlistment of "one soldier who scores 50
or higher on the ASVAB" or "two soldiers who score 31–49." Private
E-1s are paid $1,301 a month, while E-2s earn $1,458 per month.
Further, getting a second high-scoring friend or two more low-scoring
friends to enlist earns the student another promotion, to Private
E-3, and kicks the entry pay up to $1,534 per month. Another way DEPs
can earn extra money is to volunteer for hazardous duty. Students who
sign up to be in a combat unit or dismantle explosives or handle
toxic chemicals get an additional $150 per month on top of their
basic pay. Volunteering for hazardous duty, however, is a relative
concept. Since DEP recruits do not, by definition, have a college
education, there are few other military occupations open to them,
unless their ASVAB scores are high enough for them to qualify for
advanced training. With the greatest need in this war being combat
soldiers so much so that even highly trained Air Force personnel are
being sent to work with Army ground troop units the chances of any
DEP recruit getting out of combat duty and its attendant hazards are
slim. The ASVAB is also administered only in English, and any job
requiring even a security clearance cannot be held by a noncitizen.
The implications of these conditions for young immigrants can be
deadly. The Department of Defense's casualty database doesn't
publicly break down the dead and injured by ethnic group, but a tally
of Latino surnames found that between Jan. 10 and July 1, 2007, 20
percent of the 174 young people ages 18 to 21 who died were likely to
have been Latino. With the intensification of DEP recruiting efforts
in largely Latino high schools since the invasion began, this is no surprise.
What's Legal?
How many of these young Latino recruits are illegal immigrants?
"Nobody knows," says Flavia Jimenez, an immigration policy analyst at
the National Council of La Raza. "But what we do know is that
recruiters may not be up to speed on everybody's legal status. We
also know that a significant number of [illegals] have died in Iraq."
The recruitment of illegal immigrants is particularly intense in Los
Angeles, where 75 percent of high school students are Latino. "A lot
of our students are undocumented, " says Arlene Inouye, a teacher at
Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, "and it's common knowledge
that recruiters offer green cards." Inouye is the coordinator and
founder of the Coalition Against Militarism in Our Schools, a
counter-recruitment organization that educates teenagers about
deceptive recruiting practices. "The practice is pretty widespread
all over the nation," she says, "especially in California and Texas.
The recruiters tell them, 'You'll be helping your family.'"
Inouye referred me to Salvador Garcia, a student whose father had
been deported and who had been approached by a recruiter when he was
a freshman at Garfield (he is now a senior). Garcia says the
recruiter told him, "If you need papers, come and fight for us and we
can get you some, and then you'll never have to mess with immigration. "
When Garcia told the recruiter that he was born in this country, the
recruiter responded, "Do you have anybody in your family that needs a
green card, needs papers?" Salvador told him that his father, who had
entered the country illegally from Mexico, had recently been
deported. "If you join the military you can get your father back,"
the recruiter reportedly said. "It's not a problem. We can get him
his papers, and nobody will ever bother him again." Salvador says he
almost signed the enlistment form right then, but says he was stopped
by the realization of "how it's all connected--the war and Mexico and
immigration. " He is now active in the counter-recruitment movement.
Recruiters in other parts of the country are making the same promises.
Counter-recruitment activist Juan Torres, whose only son was killed
in Afghanistan, works with a number of counter-recruitment groups,
including Gold Star Families for Peace and Military Families Speak
Out, but mostly he works on his own, speaking at churches and schools
around the country. He estimates that in the past year, close to 200
students have told him that they have been offered green cards for
enlisting, and he says he personally knows of "five or six illegal
families who have kids without papers in Iraq."
Torres talked one teenage girl into changing her mind just as she was
about to sign the enlistment papers. He says that the recruiter told
her, "Now you're in trouble. You and your family, you will have to
leave." Torres says he once asked a recruiter, the son of one of his
friends, "How can you lie to the kids like that?" The recruiter told
him, "Sorry, it's my job, and I don't want to go back to Iraq."
Despite the mounting evidence of these recruitment practices, the
Pentagon denies that illegal immigrants are in the military. "If
there are any," says Pentagon spokesman Joseph Burlas, "then they
have fraudulently enlisted, and when they're caught, they are discharged."
That is what happened to Army Pvt. Juan Escalante, whose illegal
status was discovered while he was serving in Iraq. He was discharged
and shipped home, and ICE began deportation proceedings against him
and his parents, who had smuggled him into the United States from
Mexico when he was 4 years old.
However, Escalante's unit commander wrote a letter on his behalf,
saying he had served with distinction, so ICE reversed its decision
and accepted his citizenship application. The deportation case
against his parents, who also have two U.S.-born children, is still pending.
Another illegal immigrant serving in Iraq, Jose Gutierrez, was not so
lucky. He was one of the first members of the U.S. armed forces to
die during the invasion. Gutierrez had made his way to this country
from Guatemala in 1996, at the age of 15, to escape the violence
perpetrated by the death squads, only to be killed in Iraq by friendly fire.
When the Pentagon announced his death, it came in the form of a
carefully managed PR campaign that included a posthumous award of
citizenship for Gutierrez, presumably to show that if an illegal
immigrant manages to enlist and make it to Iraq, he will be rewarded.
However, Gutierrez remains the only illegal alien on the U.S.
casualty rolls whose real place of birth is listed, while others who
die are reported to be from Boston or Los Angeles or wherever a
recruiter finds them. In New York City, according to
counter-recruitment activist Melida Arredondo, whose young stepson
was killed in Iraq, DEP recruiters instruct illegal immigrants to
write "New York City" as their "home of record address" on the
enlistment form, and to write "pending" for their Social Security Number.
Noncitizen Soldiers
Why is all of this happening, when the enlistment and expedited
naturalization of illegal immigrants serving in the armed forces is
specifically authorized in U.S. law? An executive order signed by
President Bush on July 3, 2002, provided for the "expedited
naturalization for aliens and noncitizen nationals serving in an
active-duty status in the Armed Forces of the United States during
the period of the war against terrorists of global reach." Under this
order, any noncitizen in the military can apply for expedited
citizenship on his first day of active duty. Not only is this order
still in effect, but it has been codified in the National Defense
Authorization Act 2006. With the law so clear on this issue, the
treatment of illegal immigrants in the military, both by the Pentagon
and by ICE, is difficult to understand.
"Apparently, " says Lt.-Col. Margaret Stock, a nationally known
immigration attorney and professor of military law at West Point,
"nobody at the Pentagon reviewed the [regulations] on immigrants when
the war started." She adds, "If the Pentagon has any immigration
attorneys, I haven't met them."
Stock speculates that if the Pentagon is aware of the law, it might
be "afraid there would be a political backlash" if the use of
immigrant labor for the war were discussed openly. In a later email,
she added, "And by the way, the Pentagon has always had the authority
to recruit foreigners in wartime. ... The only thing that changed in
January 2006 [when Bush signed the NDAA] was that Congress made it
harder for the Pentagon to recruit foreigners who are not Lawful
Permanent Residents. It used to be that anyone could join the
military in wartime even undocumented immigrants but now the service
secretaries have to find that an undocumented person's enlistment is
'in the vital interest' of the United States." To illustrate her
point, Stock notes that a section of the 2006 Immigration and
Nationalization Law locates the naturalization of immigrants serving
in Iraq firmly in the tradition of naturalizations during wars dating
back to World War I. During these wars, citizenship was granted
solely on the basis of three years of honorable service or honorable
discharge, whether or not the person ever lived in the United States.
"Recruiters trying to fill slots have historically pressed vulnerable
people into service," says Dan Kesselbrenner, director of the
National Immigration Project, a program of the National Lawyers
Guild. "But for some people, it's the only way they are ever going to
get citizenship. "
What recruiters do not tell their targets, however, is that the
military itself has no authority to grant citizenship. It forwards
their citizenship applications to ICE, which will then scrutinize
them and their entire families for up to a year. Recruiters also do
not tell their targets that citizenship can be denied for the very
same past criminal offenses that the military may have overlooked
when admitting them such as being in the country illegally. Nor do
they tell recruits that citizenship can be denied for any kind of
dishonorable behavior, which includes refusing to participate in combat.
As the war in Iraq drags on and recruiters step up their efforts to
enlist high school students even demanding the right to come into
classrooms teachers, parents and students themselves are doing what
they can to slow the rate of enlistment of young immigrants who
believe that military service is their path to citizenship. But as
long as American citizenship remains a kind of salvation myth for the
Latino community, military recruiters will be able to exploit their
longing for it.
The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill, which failed to pass the
Senate in June, proposed to give legal permanent residency to any
"alien who has served in the uniformed services for at least two
years and, if discharged, has received an honorable discharge."
In other words, illegal immigrants have been in the military all
along, and the government was getting ready to admit it. Now, with
the bill's defeat, they will be forced to remain hidden, and the
sacrifices they have made for this country will continue to go unacknowledged.
This archive consists of a topically organized selection of
articles culled by members of the Counter-Recruitment List Serve from printed
publications and web sites. The archive is not complete. We have chosen
material relevant to the work of