Keeping Faith with Immigrant Military Personnel and Veterans

This chapter considers why immigrant military personnel and veterans should be granted unconditional naturalization immediately upon enlistment. It makes a normative argument for reviving the connection between the obligations of military service and the rights of citizenship. It applies this argument to the political problem of deporting noncitizen military personnel and veterans. In the U.S., military service currently does not immediately result in naturalization. Nor does it protect a noncitizen veteran from deportation. The normative content of the oath of enlistment should be construed as creating a permanent reciprocal relationship of rights and obligations between the U.S. government and a soldier regardless of citizenship status. Noncitizens who serve in a nation’s armed forces during a period of declared hostilities should be rendered immune from deportation for the rest of their lives. If they commit an offense, they should be punished for their crimes without being deported or denaturalized.

Conclusion

This conclusion reflects upon President Trump’s stances on immigration and citizenship in the first year of his administration. I frame recent developments in the historical context of a nation that still grapples with the implications of its aspirational heritage as a country of immigrants, even as the U.S. continually backslides into its legacy of multiple discriminations. Though we are in a period of restrictionism, reflected prominently in the Trump administration’s attempts to cancel the DACA program, immigrants continue to resist exclusion and to serve as workers, parents, volunteers, and soldiers. This chapter concludes by focusing on the moral claims of DACA recipients to inclusion in the United States. It argues that like their native-born peers and younger siblings, they are already Americans by virtue of their upbringing, education, and formative experiences in this country, and they should be permanently protected from removal from the United States.

Moving Past “Americanization” toward Earned Citizenship

This chapter considers what proponents of inclusive immigration reform in the U.S. can learn from the normative successes and shortcomings of twentieth century Americanization movements as pathways to integration and preparation for citizenship. At their best, past Americanization movements—including LULAC—prepared immigrants for naturalized citizenship while they served in workplaces and families. Today, immigrants are already assuming many of the duties of citizenship, though some are denied a pathway to naturalization. Legalization of unauthorized immigrants, coupled with a noncoercive civic education campaign with the full support of government, employers, and civil society, can help immigrants contribute to their full potential and aspire for U.S. citizenship. Individual citizens have a moral obligation to help immigrants learn more skills—from language to vocational training—toward the mutually beneficial goal of helping them contribute more to their adopted communities in the future.

Earned Citizenship through Military Service

This chapter uses the civic republican tradition as a theoretical lens to examine how previously excluded groups were able to draw on their wartime service to demand equal treatment as citizens and why unauthorized immigrants should be able to earn naturalization through military service. It first considers how Mexican American veterans were able to leverage their military service to demand the rights and benefits of first-class citizenship. It then interprets this historical account through a frame of “Mexican American republicanism,” connecting loyalty and service to citizenship claims. Unauthorized immigrants who want to follow this pathway to citizenship can no longer do so, given current barriers to enlistment. This chapter closes by analyzing and critiquing U.S. policies governing immigrant military enlistment. As a whole, this chapter serves as a work of applied political theory with implications for the contemporary U.S. immigration reform debate.

Caring as a Civic Service

This chapter argues that family immigration policies should be expanded to encompass caregiving duties performed by family members and fictive kin for dependents, including disabled and elderly adults. To make this case, it applies a public ethic of care to revalue caregiving services as socially necessary work and a civic duty that merits an earned pathway to citizenship for immigrants. A public ethic of care ensures that the polity’s most vulnerable members are continually cared for by their ongoing primary caregivers in their communities. It also provides a basis for recognizing the value of care work provided by immigrant caregivers. This chapter contends that immigrant caregivers of dependent citizens are providing a service to society that might otherwise have to be undertaken less attentively by the state at the taxpayers’ expense. For their services, those who care for dependents deserve a pathway to legalization and citizenship.

Recognizing the Civic Value of Parenting a New Generation

This chapter contends that polities have a long-term public policy interest in applying the same best interests of the child standard that they use for domestic child welfare determinations to immigration cases that involve deportable noncitizen parents, balanced against the interests of citizens in effective immigration regulation and enforcement. The burden lies with parents who have entered and continued to reside without authorization in a country to show that their right to remain is of benefit to existing citizens. This means that unauthorized immigrant parents should initially be given conditional permission to stay in their children’s country of long-term residence to raise them. Deportable parents should be legalized to fulfill a duty of care to their long-term resident or citizen children in the communities where they reside and be offered the opportunity to acquire citizenship based on their service to their broader communities.

Civic Membership as Reciprocity

Immigration enforcement regimes operate on the pretense that states have the unilateral right to exclude migrants who have entered without their consent. This chapter contends that when unauthorized long-term residents provide necessary services to their adopted countries, citizens have a normative obligation to reconsider their collective decision to exclude them. The principle of civic membership as reciprocity stands for the proposition that a person should be able to earn restitution for immigration offenses and a pathway to citizenship by working with citizens to sustain public institutions. To account for each polity’s interest in preserving its identity through admissions and naturalization decisions, an individual state can modify the principle of civic membership as reciprocity to privilege forms of service that it has historically singled out for public honors. It can then apply this principle to consider why military service by unauthorized immigrants merits regularization and naturalization in countries with a strong citizen soldier tradition.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s argument for a pathway to U.S. citizenship for long-term resident, unauthorized immigrants through their community contributions in relationships they have developed over time in their adopted country. It addresses the scope of the policy challenge of unauthorized immigrant residence in the U.S. in terms of numbers of migrants and the persistence of the political debate over their future. It explains the special moral challenges that arise from immigrant military service, as well as from the deportation of the parents of citizen children and the separation of their families through immigration enforcement. It then provides a set of nonhumanitarian justifications for legalizing unauthorized immigrants based on their contributions in their relationships with citizens. This argument balances citizen interests in enforcing immigration laws against mitigating factors, including service to citizens, communities, and the nation as a whole.