COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Youth of Color
Why Won't We Let Them Fill the Ranks?
Brigid Schulte, Washington Post
June 3, 2007
All this past year, Navy and Marine Corps recruiters kept calling Jonathan. The 17-year-old liked what they said to him. And they liked him. He was young and healthy, a star soccer player on his school team. He was fluent in English and Spanish, interested in computers and engineering and about to graduate from T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria. He wasn't afraid to die for his country, he told them.A Navy recruiter came to Jonathan's apartment one evening last fall and won his family over with promises that the Navy could help him continue his studies in college -- something financially out of reach for his mother, who works as a babysitter, and father, an electrician and sometime pizza deliveryman.
Out came the recruiter's laptop for the standard military aptitude test. The program first required Jonathan to type in his Social Security number. But there was the catch -- he doesn't have one.
He explained that his parents had brought him to the United States from Ecuador when he was 11, then overstayed their five-year tourist visa. The recruiter closed the laptop and left. Thus ended Jonathan's hopes of a military career. The family, fearing deportation, promptly moved.
This is a snapshot of a modern dilemma: a military in the middle of a vicious war, stretched to the breaking point for want of fresh recruits, and a potential recruit rejected for want of legal immigration papers. The solution is easy. Open the ranks to the bountiful pool of willing recruits like Jonathan, many of whom have lived here for most of their young lives, have graduated from U.S. high schools and are American in all but legal status. It's the bitter politics of immigration that's getting in the way.
"The only problem was my status," a rueful Jonathan told me the other day. If not for that, "I would have been in." He thinks about his parents, both college-educated, who brought him and his younger sister to the United States figuring they'd have a better life here. "My parents sacrificed to get the whole family here, so why wouldn't I sacrifice for them? Even though America is not really my country, representing it, fighting for it, would be like saying thank you."
And the prospect of service in Iraq doesn't bother him. "Eventually everyone dies," he said. "I'm not afraid to go over there."
The irony is, the majority of young Americans are afraid to go over there. Or at least they're unwilling to go. For the past two years, as the war in Iraq has raged and public sentiment has solidified against it, military recruiters, particularly in the Army, have faced increasing difficulty finding quality recruits.
They've lowered standards, accepting more soldiers with poorer scores on military aptitude tests and no high school diploma. They've raised the age of enlistment to as high as 42. They've offered millions of dollars in signing, promotion and retention bonuses. They're taking more people with medical problems. And they're using thousands of "moral waivers" to enlist recruits with records of petty crime or drug offenses. Steven Green, who was charged last year with raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl and killing her family in Mahmudiyah, Iraq, was one of those.
With tours of duty being extended and re-extended and the pressure on to find the 30,000 additional troops to carry out the Bush administration' s "surge," and with no clear end to the "war on terror" in sight, the military dilemma is fast becoming a crisis.
Curiously, most Pentagon officials and military analysts are looking everywhere but to people like Jonathan for the solution. Some are even calling for the United States to recruit overseas and create a French-style foreign legion, promising eventual citizenship to those who sign up. "I would set up some recruiting offices in Manila and maybe some areas of Sub-Saharan Africa where English is spoken and al-Qaeda is not present," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military scholar at the Brookings Institution. "Like Ghana, Namibia, Zimbabwe. Congo, even, but with intensive language training."
Others argue that a forceful, patriotic call to arms, rather than a mercenary force or a draft, is the way to go. "Any society such as ours, a democracy, that says our boys and girls won't fight to defend us, we'll get foreigners to do our dirty work, will disappear into the ashbin of history," retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey warned in an interview
But Jonathan doesn't feel foreign. He feels American.
He is one of an estimated 750,000 undocumented youths of military age living in the United States, a small portion of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants who are at the heart of the contentious debate in Congress on immigration reform. The proposed legislation includes provisions of the Dream Act, a bill knocking around the Hill since 2001 that would create a path to a green card and citizenship for any undocumented youths who were brought to the United States before they were 16, have lived here for five years and either attend college or serve honorably in the military for at least two years. The bill would allow youths without proper documentation to circumvent current military regulations that open doors only to those with green cards.
By law, these undocumented boys are already required to register for the Selective Service, ostensibly to be called upon to fight for the United States in a time of war. And since last year, Congress has given military officials the ability to recruit anyone -- anyone-- deemed "vital to the national interest," though the military has not given its recruiters the same green light. Even David S. Chu, the Pentagon's undersecretary for personnel and readiness, has expressed support for the controversial idea of recruiting illegal immigrants into the armed forces. "Many of these young people may wish to join the military, and have the attributes needed -- education, aptitude, fitness and moral qualifications, " he told a Senate panel last year.
So why not recruit Jonathan?
Pragmatists like O'Hanlon aren't against the idea. They just worry that it won't go anywhere because conservatives bent on deporting illegal immigrants would be offended by the idea of rewarding someone they consider a breaker of the nation's laws with the right to wear the nation's uniform. But given the state of emergency in the military, the threat of failing in Iraq and of returning to the days of the "broken Army" of the 1970s, even the right isn't holding fast.
"I'm happy to have the military work that out however they want to," said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates immigration restrictions. "My concern is when people see service in the military and immigration as having some kind of synergy, as though we can offer citizenship as a way to fill out our recruiting quota."
But in reality, that synergy has always been there.
Immigrants, both legal and illegal, have served in the U.S. military since the American Revolution. During the Civil War, Irish immigrants fresh off the boat with no papers were sent to fight on the front lines in the Union army along with Germans, Scandinavians, Swedes and others, making up about 20 percent of the force. My own Irish ancestors signed up within weeks of arrival in the 1870s and were shipped out West to fight the Indian Wars.
Today, about 40,000 immigrants serve in the U.S. military. Most, as required by military regulations, are legal permanent residents, so-called green-card soldiers.
An unknown number of undocumented immigrants, "no card" soldiers, have managed to slip under the radar as well. Now, a new wartime provision enables these immigrant troops, whom the military presumes to be legal, to apply for U.S. citizenship from the first day of service. Since Sept. 11, 2001, 26,000 green-card soldiers have become naturalized -- more than 70 of them posthumously. One of those posthumous citizenships was granted to Lance Cpl. Jose Antonio Gutierrez, the second U.S. service member killed in the Iraq war, who had received his green card by lying about his age.
"When they declared war on Iraq, everybody in our center let out a cheer because so many people thought that meant they could legalize their status," says Kim Propeack, an immigration advocate with Casa de Maryland, which helps legal and illegal immigrants find jobs and housing. People have become legal through military service in times of war for years, she said. And the military option is one that many like Jonathan desperately want.
Sebastian, 21, graduated from high school in Prince George's County in 2005. He arrived in 1999, in search of a job to help his family back in Mexico. But high school changed everything, he said. He discovered that in the United States, one can have a future. He had a series of online conversations with military recruiters. But he cut the contacts short when he became afraid that they'd find out about his status and report him. "I've been here almost eight years. I feel like I belong to this country," he said. "People like me, we want to serve the country. We love this country. We don't have papers. We can't afford to go to college. The military is the perfect option for us." Instead, he works at a seafood carry-out.
Jonathan graduated from T.C. Williams last week. His friends are getting ready to join the military or pack up and go to college in the fall. He's working at a retail store and wondering if his parents' sacrifices were for nothing. Sitting at Dunkin' Donuts drinking lemonade, he said the Marines keep phoning. But, he shrugged, he knows better than to answer their call.
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