US offers citizenship to immigrants for joining armed forces

New York, Feb 15 (PTI) Join army and get US citizenship,
that is the new slogan of American military which is stretched
thin in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It will begin recruiting skilled immigrants, who are
living in the country on temporary visas, enticing them with a
fast track to United States citizenship in as little as six
months.

Immigrants having green cards, have been eligible to
enlist since long. But the latest effort, for the first time
since the Vietnam War, will open the armed forces for
temporary immigrants if they have lived in the country for a
minimum of two years, the New York Times reported.

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

"The American Army finds itself in a lot of different
countries where cultural awareness is critical," Lt Gen
Benjamin C Freakley, the top recruitment officer for the Army,
which is leading the pilot programme was quoted as saying.
"There will be some very talented folks in this group," he
said.

The programme, the paper says, will begin with small
limited to 1,000 enlistees nationwide in its first year, most
for the Army and some for other branches.

If the pilot program succeeds as Pentagon officials
anticipate, it will expand for all branches of the military.
For the Army, it could eventually provide as many as 14,000
volunteers a year, or about one in six recruits.

About 8,000 permanent immigrants with green cards join
the armed forces annually, the Pentagon reports, and about
29,000 foreign-born people currently serving are not American.

Although the Pentagon has had wartime authority to
recruit immigrants since shortly after the September 11
attacks, military officials have moved cautiously to lay the
legal groundwork for the temporary immigrant program to avoid
controversy within the ranks and among veterans over the
prospect of large numbers of immigrants in the armed forces,
the Times said.

A preliminary announcement of the programme last year
drew a stream of angry comments from officers and veterans.

The military does not allow illegal immigrants to enlist,
and that policy would not change, the Times said citing
Military officers. Recruiting officials pointed out that
volunteers with temporary visas would have already passed a
security screening and would have shown that they had no
criminal record. PTI