Revolution #106, October 28, 2007

A Way Out of the Shadows for Immigrants?

U.S. Says: Become Cannon Fodder

Jesus Suarez del Solar died on March 27, 2003, when he stepped on a U.S. cluster bomb in Iraq, where he was a Marine lance corporal. His father, Fernando Suarez, has become an outspoken anti-war activist. Fernando was thrown out of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York for holding up a sign that said, “Bush Lied, My Son Died.”

Fernando Suarez says that his son was approached by U.S. military recruiters when he was 13—and living in Tijuana, Mexico. Jesus’s parents, thinking that he would get a better education in the U.S., sold their home and laundry business and moved to Escondido, just over the border in California. Jesus enrolled in a high school known for high academic achievement, but the recruiters talked him into transferring to a school for “troubled teens,” where the requirements for graduating were lower and he could finish earlier.

Jesus was 17 when he graduated. But he was still too young to enlist on his own, so his father co-signed the enlistment papers. Jesus was only 20 when he died in Iraq, fighting in the Bush regime’s immoral and illegitimate war.

Fernando talks about the way the U.S. military recruiters lured his son, and how they go after other youth in Mexico and the barrios in the U.S. “This, in my opinion, is very immoral.”

Under the pressure of finding a way to survive while living in the shadows, many immigrant families have been faced with this dilemma of sending their kids to war in exchange for possibly getting legal status, and perhaps avoid being snatched up on the streets, at home, or at work and getting deported.

What kind of a system is it that forces people into such cruel choices? Look at how the U.S. rulers, and other imperialist powers, roam all over the world, plundering resources and super-exploiting billions of people—including children forced into slave labor—and enforcing all this with brutal military threats, invasions, and occupations. These imperialist dominators distort and ruin economies and crush people’s lives—like in Mexico, where penetration by U.S. capital has devastated agriculture and driven millions of people to desperately seek work across the border in order to feed themselves and their families. Then, when these immigrants make the often-deadly trek across the border and arrive in the U.S., they are hounded by armed immigration police and reactionary vigilantes, and demonized as “criminals” and even “threats to national security.”

And now, these same rulers who forced people into this situation offer a “way out” for immigrant youth: to risk their lives brutalizing and killing people in Iraq and elsewhere who find themselves in exactly the same situation! Like Jesus Suarez, these youth are told by the U.S. rulers: If you sign up for the our military and go off to fight for the empire, we’ll consider you eligible to become “good American citizens.”

The “Dream Act”

The difficulties in recruiting enough new soldiers into their military has led the U.S. rulers to expand their recruitment among oppressed people—even those who are in the U.S. “illegally.” One track the government is pursuing is to revive a provision of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill (CIRB), which failed to pass the Senate in June 2007. The provision, the so-called “Dream Act” (or Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act), is mostly known for its offer to open up a path to legalization, and maybe even citizenship status, to undocumented immigrants who attend college and earn a two-year degree or finish two years toward a bachelors degree.

But there is a lesser known part of the Dream Act—it offers the same possibility for legalization for undocumented immigrants who join the armed forces for at least two years and who have been living in the U.S. for at least six years prior to that. This legislation has now been attached to the defense bill in the Congress, which will be voted on soon. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, a co-sponsor of the amendment, said it was appropriate to attach the Dream Act to the defense bill because this would “address a very serious recruitment crisis that faces our military.”

On Sunday, October 14, the Chicago Tribune published an editorial entitled “A recruiter’s dream,” which says: “Serve in the military; get a leg up on citizenship.” This same editorial says: “The Army Times reports that military leaders in charge of recruiting and personnel policy called the measure ‘very appealing.’”

In June, Durbin said, “It turns out that many in the Department of Defense believe, as I do, that the Dream Act is an important part of making certain we have talented young men and women ready to serve in our military.” The Dream Act has broad bipartisan support in Congress.

While the U.S. imperialists have always lured immigrants to serve as cannon fodder for their wars with the promise of giving them citizenship, this most recent push to ensnare hundreds of thousands of youth into the war machine began shortly after 9/11 when George Bush signed Executive Order 13296, which promised to shorten the time immigrants have to wait for citizenship if they serve in the armed forces.

According to the Pentagon, there are now 35,000 non-citizens in the U.S. military, and about 8,000 join each year to try to take this promised path to citizenship. The government estimates that if the Dream Act were to be passed, there would be about 750,000 undocumented youth eligible to be recruited. (The Boston Globe, June 16, 2007)

Even as the rantings of those like Lou Dobbs and Congressman (and presidential candidate) Tancredo are blasted over the airwaves, labeling “illegal aliens” as “criminals” and worse, the thought of hundreds of thousands of young people available to slaughter and die for this empire has made even those who have opposed any path to legalization have second thoughts. The Boston Globe quotes retired Air Force General Thomas McInerney, identified as a “conservative commentator and military analyst,” saying that the Dream Act “…is not perfect, but it is far better than some of the ways they are talking about granting illegals new status here.”

Recruiters Target Oppressed Youth

Whatever happens with the Dream Act, military recruiters are already heavily targeting youth in immigrant and oppressed communities. On October 15, the Chicago Public Schools commissioned the first public school run by the U.S. Marines. A few days later, Chicago officials announced that an Air Force academy high school would open in 2009. Chicago already has the highest number of junior cadet programs in the country. More than 11,000 students are enrolled in the district’s five military academies. Most of these are in low-income, oppressed communities where there are large concentrations of immigrants.

In Los Angeles, another city that the armed forces have targeted for its large Latino population, Arlene Inouye, a teacher at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, says, “It is common knowledge that recruiters offer green cards [permanent resident status]” to youth who enlist in the military.

Recruiting U.S. Mercenaries Worldwide

These cold-blooded calculations of recruiting non-U.S. citizens are not just limited to those living in the U.S. These imperialists want to be the new Rome. They are envisioning a kind of “foreign legion” to complement the mercenary armies like Blackwater that they already employ in many parts of the world. Following in the footsteps of the Romans, who took conquered people to fight in different lands; or the French, with their infamous Foreign Legion; or the British, who enlisted Nepalese soldiers called Gurkhas, to serve in their army—today the U.S. is attempting to forge an army out of its colonized people to fight on many fronts.

On October 19, 2006, the Washington Post published an article by Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who proposed such a plan. They wrote: “Despite growing anti-Americanism, U.S. citizenship is still one of the world’s most precious commodities, so there should be no shortage of volunteers. Since proficiency in English would presumably be important for those joining the armed forces, we might focus on South Asia, anglophone Africa, and parts of Latin America, Europe and East Asia (the Philippines would be a natural recruiting ground) where English is common as a second language. These regions have more than 2 billion people, tens of millions of whom reach military age each year.”

This is the thinking of people who want an unchallenged and unchallengeable empire and have declared they are waging an endless war to achieve it.

Send us your comments.

If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.