Posted July 6, 2018, 5:17 pm CDT
Calixto’s not alone, according to the AP. The wire service found more than 40 such individuals through talking to immigration attorneys. Margaret Stock, an Anchorage immigration lawyer who is a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, told the AP she’d received numerous messages in recent days from immigrant recruits who’d been discharged suddenly. All had enlisted and taken their oaths; many were in the reserve.
Stock, who does not represent Calixto, said soldiers told her the Pentagon had not been able to do an extensive background check. Then, they said, the Army said they had failed their background checks.
“Immigrants have been serving in the Army since 1775,” said Stock, an ABA member who
received a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2013 and planned to use it to publicize the benefits of immigration. “We wouldn’t have won the revolution without immigrants. And we’re not going to win the global war on terrorism today without immigrants.”
The MAVNI program—which the AP says Stock helped devise—was an attempt to boost military recruiting and help find personnel with medical skills or fluency in 44 specified languages. Nearly 110,000 members of the Armed Forces have become citizens since 2001, the Defense Department told the AP. A RAND Corp. study found that these recruits were generally more cost-effective than their native-born peers.
But the program has faced political opposition, particularly since former President Barack Obama expanded it to include recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The military responded with more security checks, and the Trump administration added to those, creating a backlog. Congressman Andy Harris, R-Maryland, told the AP he wants to limit MAVNI and “prioritize enlisting American citizens.”
Enlisting American citizens may be tough, as Business Insider reported in March. That’s partly because of low unemployment, which tends to drive down recruiting, and partly because not every American has the necessary medical, educational and criminal-record background.
That article noted that the military ended expedited naturalization after basic training—part of the MAVNI program—at the beginning of 2018, and has closed the offices of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Army bases that handle basic training.
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