Struggling to get US citizenship? Join army

Join the army and get US citizenship, that is the new slogan of American military which is stretched thin in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It will begin recruiting skilled immigrants, who are living in the country on temporary visas, enticing them with a fast track to United States citizenship in as little as six months.

Immigrants having green cards, have been eligible to enlist since long. But the latest effort, for the first time since the Vietnam War, will open the armed forces for temporary immigrants if they have lived in the country for a minimum of two years, the New York Times reported.

Recruiters expect that the temporary immigrants will have more education, foreign language skills and professional expertise than many Americans who enlist, helping the military to fill shortages in medical care, language interpretation and field intelligence analysis.

“The American Army finds itself in a lot of different countries where cultural awareness is critical,” Lt Gen Benjamin C Freakley, the top recruitment officer for the Army, which is leading the pilot programme was quoted as saying. “There will be some very talented folks in this group,” he said.
The programme, the paper says, will begin with small limited to 1,000 enlistees nationwide in its first year, most for the Army and some for other branches.

If the pilot program succeeds as Pentagon officials anticipate, it will expand for all branches of the military. For the Army, it could eventually provide as many as 14,000 volunteers a year, or about one in six recruits.

About 8,000 permanent immigrants with green cards join the armed forces annually, the Pentagon reports, and about 29,000 foreign-born people currently serving are not American.