COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Youth of Color
Illegal Immigrants: Uncle Sam Wants You
Deborah Davis, In These Times
July 25, 2007
Latino teenagers, including illegal immigrants are being recruitedinto the military with false promises.
In 1996, Jesus Alberto Suarez del Solar was a 13-year-old boy,
up from Tijuana on a family shopping trip, when he stopped at a
Marine Corps recruiting table at an open-air mall in Chula Vista, Calif.
Jesus had been an easy mark for the recruiter-a boy who
fantasized that 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 to Escondido, where 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 and a half 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 in Escondido, 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, depending on what the Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) 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.
From African American to Latino
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 equal treatment regardless of
race. DEP 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. A 1995 article in Marketing Science,
"The Navy Enlistment Marketing Experiment," noted that "a surprising
development was the emergence of the Hispanic population as an
important variable contributing to the pool of ... contracts. Further
investigation of the phenomenon is warranted."
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 cared most about-pride in family, children
in school 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, uses the firm's proprietary "barrio anthropology" and
grassroots "viral and guerilla 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 spokesperson, 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, earn bucks
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. The DEP
website provides tips on how students can assist recruiters in
signing up their friends. The student can:
Provide your recruiter with names and numbers of anyone you know who
is considering joining the military.
Obtain the names and numbers of people who work with you or attend
places you frequent and the best time to talk to them.
Obtain the names and numbers of friends or acquaintances who sit with
you in classes.
Help your recruiter by screening his/her lists.
Accompany your recruiter to places your friends normally hang out and
make introductions.
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 to
dismantle explosives, or to 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, except if their ASVAB scores are high
enough for them to qualify for advanced training. But 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 non-citizen. The implications of these
conditions for young immigrants can be deadly.
The Department of Defense's casualty database
(http://icasualties. org) doesn't publicly break down the dead and
injured by ethnic group, but a tally of Latino surnames found that
between January 10 when the surge began and July 1, 20 percent of the
174 young people (aged 18-21) who died were likely to have been
Latino (the military does not keep public data on the race or
ethnicity of casualties). With the intensification of DEP recruiting
efforts in largely Latino high schools since the invasion began, this
is no surprise.
Legal Illegals Vs. Illegal Illegals
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 the 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 (CAMS), 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 he 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 said. "It's not a problem, we can get him
his papers and nobody will ever bother him again." Salvador 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. In Chicago, for example, Jorge, whose entire family was
illegal, joined the military because a high school recruiter promised
that he and every member of his family would get a green card. Jorge
actually did get a green card while he was in Iraq, but he became so
angry and disillusioned when the military did nothing for his family
that he went AWOL.
He is now back in Chicago, where a counter-recruitment activist
named Juan Torres, whose only son was killed in Afghanistan, is
working on getting him discharged from the military. Torres 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 the 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." And 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 four 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 hometown 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.
Non-citizen 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 (NDAA) of 2006, that authorizes the enlistment of
(1) nationals of the United States; (2) aliens who have been lawfully
admitted for permanent residence (green card); (3) residents of
several former U.S. territories; and (4) any other person "if the
Secretary of Defense determines that such enlistment is vital to the
national interest."
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 e-mail,
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 noted 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 World War I, World War II, Korean hostilities, Vietnam
hostilities, [and] other periods of military hostilities. " During
these wars, citizenship was granted solely on the basis of three
years of honorable service or honorable separation from service
(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. Created under the
Homeland Security Act of 2002 as the successor to the law enforcement
arms of both the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the
U.S. Customs Service, ICE has been tasked "to more effectively
enforce our immigration and customs laws and protect the United
States against terrorist attacks." ICE does this, as its website
explains, "by targeting illegal immigrants: the people, money and
materials that support terrorism and other criminal activities."
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. The immigrant law that provides for the
naturalization of illegal immigrants in the military clearly states,
"No person who ... was a conscientious objector who performed no
military, air, or naval duty ... or refused to wear the uniform,
shall be regarded as having served honorably or having been separated
under honorable conditions." This means, according to Stock and other
military law experts, that while applying for conscientious objector
status is not, by itself, grounds for a dishonorable discharge,
attempting to act on one's beliefs by refusing to fight, wear a
uniform or carry a weapon, constitutes disobeying an order, which is
dishonorable behavior.
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 (S 1639), 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 2 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