US military to recruit immigrants, offer citizenship

[Naveed Yaseen]

WASHINGTON (February 16 2009): The Pentagon will begin recruiting skilled immigrants with temporary status in the United States and offer them an express path to citizenship, The New York Times reported Sunday. Citing military officials, the paper said that under the proposed program, recruits would be able to become US citizens in as little as six months.

Permanent residents, or holders of so-called "green cards," have been eligible to enlist in the US military for a long time. But for the first time since the Vietnam War, the military, which is stretched thin due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will now open its doors to immigrants with temporary visas if they have lived in the United States for a minimum of two years, the report said.

Recruiters expect that temporary immigrants will have more education, foreign language skills and professional expertise than many Americans, helping the military to fill vacancies in medical care, language interpretation and field intelligence analysis, The Times wrote. "The American Army finds itself in a lot of different countries where cultural awareness is critical," Lieutenant General Benjamin Freakley, the top recruitment officer for the army, told the paper.

"There will be some very talented folks in this group," he said.

The program will be first limited to 1,000 enlistees nation-wide in its first year and mostly involve the army, the report said.

If the pilot program succeeds, it will expand for all branches of the military and eventually provide as many as 14,000 volunteers a year, or about one in six recruits, The Times noted.

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