<ChicagoMayDay> US Military Targets Latinos with Extensive Recruitment Campaign/Dream Act

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From Amy Goodman's Democracy Now.... US Military Targets Latinos with Extensive Recruitment Campaign/Dream Act

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/18/yo_soy_el_army_us_military

 

MARCO AMADOR: In poor and working-class communities across the US, military recruiters are working their way into schools, churches and community groups. They are making the military a normal part of American life.
A 2009 study by the US Army-funded think tank RAND specifically pointed to Latinos as an untapped source of recruits. The study encourages the military to aggressively target the Latino community.
JORGE MARISCAL: Going way back to the Clinton administration in the '90s, there was a recognition in the Pentagon that the largest military-age group in the coming decades, really, was going to be Latino. Just because of the way the population was growing demographically, we were going to have the largest pool of young people.
MARCO AMADOR: Jorge Mariscal is a Vietnam veteran and professor of Chicano studies at the University of California in San Diego.
JORGE MARISCAL: They also realized that our young people don't have all the educational and job opportunities that some other groups do, so that meant that we were a logical community to focus on. These things, in combination with the population growth, really meant that we had a target on our back as a community.
LT. COL. MARGARET STOCK: Latinos tend to do very well at basic training, not drop out of basic training so much as other groups. They tend to stay in the military longer.
MARCO AMADOR: Margaret Stock is a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army, immigration law consultant for the Department of Defense, and a professor at West Point.
LT. COL. MARGARET STOCK: Many Latinos are comfortable with a more conservative or traditional lifestyle, I suppose you might say. They’re not—they’re able to handle a hierarchical military structure where people in charge will give orders and everybody else is expected to follow the orders. There are some communities that are less likely to be interested in that kind of lifestyle. But generally speaking—and again, this is, you know, a generalization—Latinos adjust pretty well to that kind of lifestyle. And I think it’s part of its cultural—

 

JORGE MARISCAL: If you look at the Pentagon’s own documents, they have three or four principal markets, and it’s interesting that those markets aren’t defined by ethnicity, but if you look at those markets, there are just a lot of Latinos there. So the San Antonio market is huge. The New York City area, New Jersey, again, heavy in Latinos, is one of their main market. And Miami market. The LA market is huge, which actually stretches all the way up into Central California to about San Jose. So, if you look at the, you know, demographics there, Latinos are overrepresented.
………………….

 

JORGE MARISCAL: The dream, really, of citizenship is the main thing that people—that recruiters offer. Related to that is something called the DREAM Act. Now, the DREAM Act would actually take noncitizen youths, who have been raised here, who were brought here as children, are bilingual, bicultural, fluent in English, and graduated from high school, that would allow them to serve in the military in exchange for temporary permanent residency.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: One last point I want to make on the immigration issue, something that we can do immediately that I think is very important is to pass the DREAM Act.
DREAM ACT AD: Please support the DREAM Act.
DREAM ACT AD: Please support the DREAM Act.
DREAM ACT AD: Because we all deserve equal opportunities.
DREAM ACT AD: Because we all deserve an education.
JORGE MARISCAL: What one has to realize about the DREAM Act is that the military option wasn’t attached. The military option was there at the beginning. The Pentagon helped write the DREAM Act. That’s what people have to realize.
………………..

 

AMY GOODMAN: You know, today in the headlines, we just read that four students were arrested yesterday after holding a sit-in at Senator McCain’s office. They’re calling on McCain to back the DREAM Act, which would grant permanent citizenship to undocumented workers’ children if they complete two years of college, of military, of trade school. Three of the protesters were undocumented, and now they face deportation. It’s the first time students are risking deportation to back immigration reform legislation. Talk about the DREAM Act.
MARCO AMADOR: Well, you know, for us, the DREAM Act became part of the film as we started looking into the military recruitment of the Latino community and how the Pentagon was spending millions and millions of dollars into studying this community and seeing how they can bring them more into the military life. We saw that, along that, one of those issues was the DREAM Act. The DREAM Act was introduced back in 2001. Senator Durbin was—is one of the main vocal supporters of this. But what people don’t understand is that there’s also West Point intellectuals that have been involved in the creation of the DREAM Act.
Now, within the military ranks, within these intellectuals, as it says in our films, they have a quite a bit of an understanding of the socioeconomic background that the Latinos come from. They understand that they come from poor, working-class communities, and they see that the DREAM Act is a way to bring in more of these undocumented citizens that are here in this country, to bring them into the ranks. They understand that college is an expensive alternative for a lot of these folks, so they’re offering the military. And they say it very blatantly. They say, you know, "Well, we’ll give them a job. You know, we’ll put them in the ranks, unfortunately, because they’re not citizens. We can—the only places they can work at within the military is, you know, infantry, its transportation." So again, we have this channeling of a new population being put into the military into the most dangerous positions within the military. And that’s wher we see the contradictions of the DREAM Act.
Now, we’re not, you know, focusing or saying that the students, you know, the youth that are involved in the DREAM movement are at fault here. What we’d like to understand is, do the organizations fully understand the implications of accepting the militarization of the immigrant rights movement?

 

 

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