Educated and Skilled Immigrants: Join the U.S. Military, Become a U.S. Citizen

Julia Preston of the New York Times reports that last month the Pentagon reopened a program to recruit legal immigrants with special language and medical skills. The small program will enlist roughly 1,500 recruits annually for two years.  Military officials said the pilot program brought a well-educated and skilled cohort of immigrants into the armed services. The program is open to immigrants on temporary visas, who otherwise would not be eligible to enlist. It allows them to naturalize as U.S. citizens quickly, in most cases at the end of basic training. Most immigrants on temporary visas must wait years — for some nationalities, more than a decade — to become citizens.

KJ