The Military and Citizenship

The idea of allowing non-citizens who serve in our military access to citizenship is certainly fair. In-fact, I find the notion of not allowing immigrants who are willing to make such a sacrifice for our country access to citizenship to be reprehensible. If non-citizens are allowed to serve, they must be allowed to become citizens for doing so. The question that I feel must be asked in response to the articles of Wong, Moscoso and Bender, then, is should non-citizens be allowed to serve in our military at all? When answering this question I think it is important to distinguish between resident non-citizens and foreigners who do not even live in the United States. Questions of taking advantage of the poor or underprivileged aside, (something that most immigrants joining the military are but do not necessarily have to be), I am inclined to say that resident aliens should be allowed to join the military and hence become citizens by doing so. They have an equal stake in defending their homes and lives as anyone else. This is currently the case as I understood it from the articles. One is required to be a resident of the United States to join the military, but not a citizen. This does, however, raise some important questions upon deeper reflection. These stem from the fact that non-citizens are required to serve a certain amount of time in the military before being granted citizenship. This means that they have no stake in the decisions of the society that may send them to war. This is a question raised at the end of Moscoso's article that I feel is very important but that is not elaborated on. I find it to be a serious problem that we as a society may send people to war who have no political stake in the society. This seems not only profoundly undemocratic but dangerous as well. It is similar to the disconnect that our society has with the effects of war that we talked about last class, but seems to be taken to an even greater extreme. We should not be allowed to send others to fight our wars, even if we promise to grant them access to citizenship for doing so, because it creates a situation where we as a society are displacing the risk onto someone else. For this reason, I feel that non-citizens must be granted citizenship immediately upon joining the military, if only to solve this philosophical quandry. We must not send people to die for a society that does not count them among their own.

As for the question of allowing non-resident foreigners to join our military, I think the answer must be no. My reasons for this conclusion are similar to those above. It is wrong to allow people to fight for a society or to be sent to fight by a society that they do not have a stake in. And in this case, not only do they lack a political stake, but unlike the case with resident non-citizens, they lack a literal or physical stake as well. When we begin sending foreigners to do our killing and our dieing for us we have reached a point where we have truly become disconnected from the wars that we choose to fight. When we absolve ourselves of all of the risks, we forget the seriousness of the violence that we allow or potentially cause, and therefore lack a framework from which to judge the necessity of violence. We have too little to lose in making war upon others.