Foreign-born soldiers earn US citizenship by dying in combat

So much of our activist poetry is straight up theoretical. It usually bites off more than it can chew and leaves you angry...but with no concrete enemy at which to direct your frustration. This poem is a whole other story. A solid mirror staring back at us and letting us see ourselves for who we are. As the debate on whether to loosen or tighten the US/ Mexican immigration laws rages on, foreign men and women are being encouraged to fight in the military, in exchange for the promise of US citizenship. Many of them lose their lives before they ever get to see that day. Somehow this whole practice seems archaic and unjust to me, but it still happens everyday.

Paul Flores hits the nail on the freaking head with this one! I also found a piece from the Irish Examiner describes this practice of blood for citizenship in more detail.

Brown Dreams
BY Paul Flores

"Why should Chicanos have to die to earn the approval of this society?"


Foreign-born soldiers earn US citizenship by dying in combat
Tuesday, March 25, 2008

A YOUNG, ambitious immigrant from Guatemala who dreamed of becoming an architect. A Nigerian medic. A soldier from China who boasted he would one day become an American general. An Indian native whose headstone displays the first Khanda, emblem of the Sikh faith, to appear in Arlington National Cemetery.

These were among more than 100 foreign-born members of the US military who earned American citizenship by dying in Iraq.

Jose Gutierrez was one of the first to fall, killed by "friendly fire" in the dust of Umm Qasr in the opening hours of the invasion.

In death, the young marine was showered with honours his family could only have dreamed of in life. His sister was flown in from Guatemala for his memorial service, where a Roman Catholic cardinal presided and top military officials saluted his flag-draped coffin.

And yet, his foster mother agonised as she accompanied his body back for burial in Guatemala City: Why did Jose have to die for America in order to truly belong?

Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, who oversaw Gutierrez’s service, put it differently.

"There is something terribly wrong with our immigration policies, if it takes death on the battlefield in order to earn citizenship," Mahony wrote to President George Bush in April 2003. He urged Bush to grant immediate citizenship to all immigrants who sign up for military service in wartime.

"They should not have to wait until they are brought home in a casket."

But as the war continues, more and more immigrants are becoming citizens in death — and more and more families are grappling with deeply conflicting feelings about exactly what the honour means.

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