Foreign-born vets missing chances at citizenship
Juan Valadez is not the ideal poster child for foreign-born veterans of the U.S. military who have missed, or been denied, the opportunities their service offered them for citizenship.
Under federal law, Valadez could have become a naturalized citizen during his three years’ service in the Navy, as an immigrant on active duty outside the U.S. (He was deployed in the Gulf of Aden and would be eligible for naturalization by shipboard officials.) He could have stayed out of trouble once he came back to U.S. shores instead of landing himself a three-year prison sentence for transporting a load of pot from Texas to Ohio.
But a Los Angeles Times story from this past week recounts how hundreds of U.S. military veterans who, like Valadez, were born in other countries have been subjected to deportation because of misunderstandings (or misinformation) about their rights, and in some cases just because of bad luck or bad timing.
According to the Times, immigrant and veteran advocates claim there are about 2,000 deported vets living in northern Mexico alone. Immigration and customs officials don’t know how many, because they don’t have a database of how many deportees have military service records.
Most Americans have long agreed — especially since the terror attacks of 2001, but overall since the birth of the republic — that people from other countries willing to serve in our armed forces, especially but not exclusively in wartime, have earned a right to citizenship. (A Pentagon report in 2008, with U.S. forces engaged in both Afghanistan and Iraq, estimated the annual enlistment of non-citizens at 8,000.)
The problem, it seems, for many of these vets is that they don’t know exactly what rights their service gives them, and have assumed they were citizens … until some found themselves being deported.
Margaret Stock, an Alaska lawyer who has represented veterans facing deportation, told the Times that foreign-born soldiers, sailors and Marines at boot camp graduation “raised their right hands and swore to defend the Constitution. They thought that made them citizens.”
Today, it almost would: Foreign-born boot camp graduates can now participate in a naturalization ceremony. But attitudes and laws have shifted back and forth over time. For years, citizenship was granted to non-citizens who enlisted and successfully finished boot camp. That ended after Vietnam, when the law was changed to require soldiers to complete a full year of service before applying for naturalized citizen status.
The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks prompted President George W. Bush to issue an executive order streamlining the naturalization process for foreign-born military veterans, but there’s still confusion. Some service members and vets still thought their service itself conferred automatic citizenship. Others, like Valadez, 33, fell into that nearly three decade gap between Vietnam and 9/11, and never even applied. And in some cases, Alaska attorney-advocate Stock told the Times, recruiters take advantage of the situation: “[They] mislead people. They tell them that citizenship will be automatic.” (Any recruiter who gets somebody to enlist on such fraudulent grounds deserves far worse than a gigging.)
Ultimately, of course, it is the responsibility of each would-be American citizen, regardless of his or her circumstances, to learn what the exact procedure for citizenship is.
But people who have been willing to take up arms in service to this country deserve more than just a degree of legal and bureaucratic slack. They deserve detailed information, guidance, encouragement and active help. They’ve earned it.
This story was originally published April 2, 2016 at 7:19 PM with the headline "Foreign-born vets missing chances at citizenship."