U.S. Army recruiters must be sitting at the edge of their chairs. If the DREAM ACT passes, they will have another 360,000 potential recruits. Never mind that most of the country wants to bring the soldiers back home from Iraq. Maybe they want the ones who would be the hardest workers to be there the day of the big pullout.
People used to say that the military was a great place to grow up. Maybe so, but not in the jungles of Vietnam or the dust of Iraq.
For the DREAM ACT students, it will be a tough choice.
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A military route to citizenship
Plan for undocumented youths stirs debate
Daniel González
The Arizona Republic
Sept. 17, 2007 12:00 AM
Hundreds of thousands of undocumented-immigrant youths could become eligible to join the military to offset shortages of qualified recruits under a bill pending in Congress.
...The proposal still has a strong chance of passing if backers in Congress are successful in attaching it to the annual defense-authorization bill this fall.
The Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act would allow undocumented high-school graduates to gain citizenship if they either attend college for two years or serve two years in the military.
Undocumented immigrants now are not permitted to serve.
Military analysts say the DREAM Act would help the armed forces find qualified recruits, whose numbers have dwindled because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Some immigrant groups, however, say the DREAM Act amounts to a "de facto draft."
Using immigrants to boost the ranks of the military is not new.
With the demands in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States began offering legal immigrants a chance to expedite citizenship applications for themselves and relatives if they enlisted.
Roughly 70,000 immigrants serve in the military, and about 40,000 are non-citizens. Immigrants make up about 5 percent of the total 1.4 million men and women on active duty.
..."The DREAM Act would address a very serious recruitment crisis that faces our military," Sen. Dick Durbin, the bill's author, said on the Senate floor in July while trying to muster support for the DREAM Act to be attached to the annual defense-authorization bill.
Durbin wasn't successful, but Sandra Abrevaya, a Durbin spokeswoman, said that the Illinois Democrat will try again, possibly as early as this month.
The DREAM Act has broad bipartisan support in Congress.
U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Tucson, is a co-sponsor of the bill in the House. He said the legislation has a better chance now that the military aspect is being played up.
...Poor educational conditions and inadequate schooling make military enlistment the only option for many undocumented youths, the group says.
"We are afraid that it's going to cause a de facto military draft for our undocumented youth," coordinator Jose Lara said. "We fully support the college part of it, but the reality is Latino college rates are low, so the majority will pick the military part of it."
Luis Avila, 25, a student at Arizona State University, organized a weeklong hunger strike at the end of July to raise public support for the DREAM Act in Arizona. He said he is troubled by the increased emphasis on the bill's military provision.
"The DREAM Act is not really for them to join the Army, it's for them to get their education," Avila said.
Still, many undocumented immigrants he spoke with during the fast said they would prefer to join the military.
"I told them they should go to college and then join the military so they can enter as an officer rather than be put on the front lines," Avila said.
If it passes, the DREAM Act would create a substantial pool of potential recruits. The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, D.C., estimates about 360,000 undocumented high-school graduates in the United States are of military age, between 18 and 24.
Another 715,000 undocumented youths are between the ages of 5 and 17, according to the institute.
Military analyst Margaret Stock, an immigration lawyer from Anchorage, Alaska, teaches at West Point about immigrants in the military. She said fears that the DREAM Act would turn into a "back-door draft" are unfounded.
That's because the military would need only a fraction of the undocumented immigrants made available by the DREAM Act to help offset shortages of qualified recruits.
Stock said the DREAM Act would help the military "a great deal..."
"The modern military needs a lot of smart, successful people, and a lot of the DREAM Act kids are like that," she said.
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