During the Iraq war, much was made of the accomplishments
of noncitizens in the military. To speed the granting of citizenship to these
"green-card soldiers," President Bush waived the three-year residency
requirement for naturalization. Sen. Barbara Boxer, Rep. Darrell Issa and
others have introduced legislation to ease citizenship requirements for
immigrants in the service or their families.
But no one seems to have stepped back and questioned the underlying policy: Is
it a good idea to allow noncitizens to enlist?
There now are more than 37,000 lawful permanent residents — green-card holders
— in the military, accounting for about 3% of active-duty personnel. (Illegal
aliens are prohibited from enlisting — for now). They make up 4% to 5% of all
new enlistees, and their numbers have grown by one-third since 2000.
Barring changes in immigration policy, this trend will only continue as
immigrants make up an ever-growing share of young people. In March 2002,
children of immigrant mothers accounted for 18.3% of the school-age population
and 19.2% of those younger than school age.
There are two kinds of problems with the enlistment of noncitizens: principle
and practical.
To begin with principle: The question here is one of membership in the nation.
Theodore Roosevelt rightly said that "if the immigrant who comes here in good
faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated
on an exact equality with everyone else." But Roosevelt's next sentence is
also relevant: "But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an
American, and nothing but an American."
An immigrant becomes "in very fact an American" by becoming a citizen. The
oath taken by new recruits would seem to presuppose that they are already
Americans: "I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the
Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic;
that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same." Until an immigrant
fully becomes one of us, how can we expect him to "bear true faith and
allegiance" to our Constitution, rather than his own? To use
an analogy from a different arena, you can't serve on the altar until you join
the church.
Then there are the practical problems: As the proportion of noncitizens in the
armed forces grows, there is the real possibility that defending the United
States will become "work Americans won't do."
Over the long term, budget pressures and high enlistment targets will create
incentives for the armed services to continue to cut back on pay and benefits
and to hope that shortfalls can be made up by noncitizens seeking accelerated
citizenship. This would save the Pentagon money but make military service
relatively less appealing to those Americans who already have citizenship.
This didn't happen during previous waves of immigration because there was
little disparity between immigrants and the native-born in the other
characteristics that affect enlistment rates — educational attainment, for
instance. But now the disparities are huge.
This points to another practical problem. By limiting military service to
those who have already become citizens, we might be less likely to face
instances of desertion and treason, like the San Patricio Battalion, a group
of Irish immigrants in our Army that defected to fight for the enemy in the
Mexican War. Although Sgt. Asan Akbar, the Muslim convert who allegedly killed
two of his comrades in a grenade attack in Kuwait, was not an immigrant, the
Washington Times reported recently that U.S. officials feared more attacks
from the 4,000-plus Muslims, many of them immigrants, in the armed forces.
There is a way out of this problem without changing the military's rules:
reducing immigration. Though the principled argument is unrelated to numbers,
it would become less salient if there were fewer noncitizens enlisting. And
the practical problems with immigrant enlistment would shrink if the immigrant
population were to shrink. Noncitizen enlistment and mass immigration just
don't go together. One or the other needs to be ended.
Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.