Doing its best to faithfully imitate late imperial Rome, the American empire, desperate to recruit soldiers, is beating the bushes of the immigrant population for recruits.
Just as Rome did in her later days, the U.S. is facing a native population that is increasingly uninterested in a military career, perhaps on account of the people they’d be serving with. The U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force are all reporting shortfalls in recruiting this year and are reaching out to the foreign-born with promises of high pay, education benefits, and — most important of all — a fast track to citizenship.
According to the NY Post, the Army, for example, says nearly 2,900 legal immigrants were enlisted during the first half of this budget year, an increase of 700 over last year. The largest numbers of immigrant recruits are coming from Jamaica, followed by Mexico, the Philippines, Haiti, Nepal, Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic.
The service’s top brass is quick to put a positive spin on the effort. Air Force Maj. Gen. Ed Thomas, who heads Air Force recruitment, says, “We have large populations of legal US residents who are exceptionally patriotic, they’re exceptionally grateful for the opportunities that this country has provided.”
Some may be “exceptionally” patriotic and grateful, others merely exceptionally eager to get their hands on military skills and naturalization papers. According to official government figures, a total of 158,000 non-citizens have earned citizenship through military service since 2002, including more than 10,600 during a one-year period ending last September alone.
If grifting were the only problem with targeting of immigrants, that would be bad enough, but there is also the long-term and growing, though little-discussed, spread of criminal gangs in the various services.
According to a 2013 survey, “nearly every major street gang, some prison gangs, and various OMGs [Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs] have representation on domestic and international US military installations. Gangs identified with military-trained members include: the Bloods, Crips, Folk Nation, Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings, MS-13, Sureños, AB, Bandidos, HAMC, Outlaws, Pagans, and Vagos MCs.” These are clearly a problem when still enlisted but remain perhaps a larger problem after discharged, when they are not only military-trained gang members (MTGM) but also U.S. citizens.
A forthcoming book by Sofya Aptekar, a professor at the City University of New York School of Labor and Urban Studies, titled Green Card Soldier: Between Model Immigrant and Security Threat,” looks at the phenomenon of the immigrant soldier, including potential criminal gang affiliations. In an interview with Aptekar, a Huffington Post writer noted the following :
Central American migrant men . . . were depicted as violent gang members. But at the same time, that same stereotype of the hyper-masculine man was the same reason recruiters said those qualities made them well suited to join to only have that backfire because they were put in dangerous military positions. [Emphasis added]
Aptekar also reveals in her book the ambivalence toward service she found in some foreign-born recruits, in particular with “Miguel,” a native Peruvian. When Aptekar met Miguel, he was already discharged from the Army and had become a naturalized U.S. citizen. Miguel confessed to her that during his service “he felt a ‘kinship with fellow Indigenous people’ and found that he had more in common with them than what he called the average American.” She says in the interview:
He [Miguel] talked to me about the stress he felt imagining that he would be put in the position of shooting a migrant when he was a migrant. That did not make him feel any more American. It also took a long time for him to become naturalized. He lived in Peru for a while after service in the military because he was not so sure that he wanted to live in the U.S. [but eventually] he came back and he embraced being an American.
Miguel went back to Peru after serving in the U.S. military? He must not have been among the “exceptionally patriotic” that General Thomas gushes about.
The foreigners enlisted by Rome were called barbarians. We don’t call them that, and many, to be sure, are well meaning and patriotic. But one might be forgiven for wondering if it’s a great idea to recruit, arm, and then naturalize large numbers of recruits who (1) have more in common with the rest of the world than with America and (2) might have gang affiliations.
For more, see the NY Post.