HN Explorer

Some visa holders (including H and B) can become citizens by joining US military

16 points by walsh-cloonagh ↗ HN
The US Department of Defense is authorized to enlist immigrants with medical or language skills through September 30, 2016 and provide a fast track to citizenship.

They would become citizens within months and could begin the process of sponsoring their spouses and parents for permanent residence straightaway.

This may be of interest to some of the many thousands of technology workers on H or L visas that don't have a path to stay in the United States, but would like to.

A majority of these visa holders are from India and several Indian languages are on the list.

Speakers of the following languages are eligible for the program:

Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cebuano, Cambodian-Khmer, Chinese, Czech, French (with citizenship from an African Country), Georgian, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Indonesian, Kashmiri, Korean, Kurdish, Lao, Malay, Malayalam, Moro (Tausug/Maranao/Maguindanao), Nepalese, Pashto, Persian Dari, Persian Farsi, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Sindhi, Serbo-Croatian, Singhalese, Somali, Swahili, Tagalog, Tajik, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu (with citizenship from Pakistan or Afghanistan), Uzbek, Yoruba

Link to Department of Defense fact sheet: http://www.defense.gov/news/mavni-fact-sheet.pdf

Link to Army program, which accepted over 1000: http://www.goarmy.com/benefits/additional-incentives/mavni.html

Link to Air Force Special Forces program, which only accepted 2 recently: http://www.afsoc.af.mil/Units/AirForceSpecialOperationsAirWarfareCenter/USAFSOS/MAVNI.aspx

8 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 24.0 ms ] thread
not_a_test_user
You no longer can say that it's hard to emigrate to the USA: you just need to enlist, give up your freedom and possibly your morals! Grrreat deal.
FireBeyond
And fluently speak the language of your homeland, which the US deems a high security risk and of particular need to have defense personnel with knowledge thereof...
walsh-cloonagh
Czech, Polish, Hungarian and Turkish are on the list: the languages of NATO allies

The languages of other many US allies are on the list as well.

So, this program is at least not entirely a Bay of Pigs style plot

dragonwriter
Yeah, the list seems to include a lot of languages that seem more likely to be motivated by potential need for US military to be cooperating with forces speaking those languages than languages associated with threat populations.
readme
If you come in as a MAVNI, you are probably not going to get to do a job using your home language, at least for a long time. It is not easy to get a security clearance as a Chinese or Russian immigrant. I met people who wanted to work as a linguist who spoke fluent English and another language. The guys I met ended up enlisting as mental health specialists and pharmacy assistants.
walsh-cloonagh
In 2012 1,031,631 people became permanent residents of the United States [1].

Obviously there are paths to citizenship. But some kinds of temporary visas don't offer a path to citizenship (like intercompany transfer L visas or F student visas) and this program could be useful to people on those visas if they'd like to stay.

[1] http://www.voanews.com/content/us-issues-million-green-cards...

readme
I'm in the Army. I've met a few people who enlisted through the MAVNI program and they are very outstanding Americans.

One guy I met, had two masters degrees (this is crazy for someone who's enlisted), one in CS and another in engineering. Most of the people I met coming in through MAVNI already had good English, like you mentioned if they do not...

Another guy was from Mexico and barely had a grasp of English. Graduates of basic training who have this issue get sent to Texas to attend a language school, though.

gusmd
Some stuff (TL; DR) from the linked DoD fact sheet:

- The applicant must have been in valid, legal status, for the last 2 years (no need to have been in the same status during those 2 years);

- Must not have had any single absence from the US longer than 90 days during those two years;

- Must commit to at least 4 years of Active Duty service.