The U.S. government has long celebrated having immigrants in the military and has touted the 158,000 people who have earned citizenship through service since 2002.
More than 10,600 service members were naturalized during a one-year period ending last September alone. To become eligible to apply for naturalization, an immigrant must have served honorably for a minimum of a year and have a certain immigration status at the time of the naturalization interview, among other requirements.
But immigrants in the military have also reported delayed timelines for the naturalization process and long periods of being trapped in bureaucratic limbo; some U.S. veterans have even been deported.
Sofya Aptekar, an associate professor at the City University of New York School of Labor and Urban Studies, takes a critical look at how the U.S. military uses the promise of citizenship to recruit immigrants under false premises. For her new book, “Green Card Soldier: Between Model Immigrant and Security Threat,” which is coming out next month, she interviewed more than 70 noncitizen soldiers from 23 countries.
Aptekar talked to HuffPost about her findings, the role of stereotypes in recruitment and the historical role the U.S. military has played regarding migration, labor and exploitation.
Talk to me about the inspiration for this book. What made you want to write it?
My first book, “The Road to Citizenship: What Naturalization Means for Immigrants and the United States,” was looking at the naturalization process and what it was like for immigrants and what it meant to them. As a part of that work, I touched a little bit on naturalization for military service as this separate, special route for those who worked in the military. But I didn’t develop it. It was always in the back of my mind.
I was chatting with a colleague some years later who does work on deportations, and he was sharing this really kind of disturbing experience where he was presenting in a border town, just…
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