Military Offers U.S. Citizenship to Non-Immigrants

On February 23, 2009, a unique opportunity to join the U.S. military and immediately apply for naturalization was made available to legal non-citizens under a new program titled “Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest,” otherwise called MAVNI.

This one-year pilot program will end on December 31, 2009 or until the 1,000 quota for military recruits is met, whichever is sooner, unless extended by the Department of Defense and the Pentagon.

MAVNI allows eligible non-citizens who are legally present in the U.S. to join the military and immediately apply for U.S. citizenship without first applying for lawful permanent residence or green card. Upon enlistment, they can get their U.S. citizenship in six (6) months or less.

This new recruitment effort is geared towards addressing the shortage of officers with skills considered strategically vital by the military such as in the areas of allied health, medicine, languages and field intelligence. They have recognized that non-citizens and temporary immigrants are rich sources of educated and talented recruits due to their knowledge of languages and cultures vital to military success.

The MAVNI program is being implemented first by the U.S. Army to recruit health care professionals (such as doctors, nurses and dentists) and persons who speak certain languages considered strategic by the military.

The languages considered strategic are: Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Burmese, Cambodian-Khmer, Chinese, Czech, Hausa, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo (a Nigerian language), Indonesian, Korean, Kurdish, Lao, Malay, Malayalam, Moro, Nepalese, Persian [Dari and Farsi], Polish, Punjabi, Pashto, Russian, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Somali, Swahili, Tamil, Turkish, Turkmen, Urdu and Yoruba.

The recruitment for applicants with language proficiency in the above selected languages will be based in New York City while recruitment for health care professionals will be nationwide.

Those who may be eligible as being legally present in the U.S. are individuals who currently hold non-immigrant statuses under the E, F, H, I, J, K, L, M, O, P, Q, R, S, T, TC, TD, TN, U and V visa categories; and those who have been granted asylee, refugee, and Temporary Protected statuses. An additional requirement is that these applicants should not have been out of the U.S. for more than 90 days for any single trip in the past two years.

This is welcome news for licensed foreign physicians under the J-1 category who are subject to the two-year residency requirement, but who would like to serve in the U.S. Army Medical Corps and acquire U.S. citizenship immediately without having to return to his/her home country and stay there for two years. If the doctor is enlisted for service, the two year home residency is automatically waived and he/she may get U.S. citizenship in six months.

Foreign educated nurses, on the other hand, may have a more complicated route since the Army Nurse Corps require that the nurses must have graduated from an American nursing school. They can, however, file for the language-based recruitment instead and from there avail of the educational benefits in the military and enroll in U.S. nursing schools and later on, apply for nursing positions in the military.

Undocumented or unauthorized immigrants are disqualified from applying under the MAVNI program. Also, those who are in the U.S. under a B visitor/tourist status and those who entered the U.S. on a Visa Waiver Program are ineligible.

Concerns of groups critical of this military initiative are assuaged by stringent screening and rigid background checks of all applicants.

Applicants are also required to meet higher standards than standard U.S. Army recruits by passing the English test and scoring 50 or higher in the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), as well as tested on their foreign language proficiency for those applying on the basis of language skills.

Health care professionals may either go on three-year active duty or join the Selected Reserve for six years. Those who enlist based on language skills are contractually obligated to serve for four years on active duty.

For more information on the MAVNI program, please visit the U.S. Army website: http://www.goarmy.com/info/mavni (for persons with language skills) and http://www.goarmy.com/info/mavni/healthcare (for doctors and nurses.)