{"id":73197,"date":"2017-07-04T09:25:58","date_gmt":"2017-07-04T13:25:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=73197"},"modified":"2017-07-04T09:25:58","modified_gmt":"2017-07-04T13:25:58","slug":"pentagon-considers-canceling-program-for-immigrant-troops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=73197","title":{"rendered":"Pentagon considers canceling program for immigrant troops"},"content":{"rendered":"

NPR<\/a> reports that the Pentagon program designed to give troops an alternate path to citizenship, Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) is under the gun because some of the 10,000 troops weren’t truthful about their academic certifications.<\/p>\n

The recruitment program began in 2009 to attract immigrants with medical or language skills, such as surgeons or Arabic speakers. It allows visa holders, asylees and refugees to bypass the green card process to become U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n

The founder of the MAVNI program, retired Lt. Col. Margaret Stock, said the security concerns are overblown. “If you were a bad guy who wanted to infiltrate the Army, you wouldn’t risk the many levels of vetting required in this program,” she said…Three Defense Department officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to discuss the memo publicly, said the Pentagon is trying to balance national security concerns with the military’s needs for specialized skills immigrants can provide. In some cases, the officials said, the Army wasn’t using the program as intended, putting MAVNI recruits in roles that didn’t match their skills.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

[The] screening process has overwhelmed the Army’s resources. According to the Pentagon memo, those security checks have “diverted already constrained Army fiscal and manpower resources from their primary roles.”<\/p>\n

Stock said many MAVNI recruits were left in limbo.<\/p>\n

“The Army said you can ship to basic training after you complete the background checks. But now they’ve canceled all the background checks so nobody can ship to basic training,” she said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So as many as a thousand people in uniform might be left with no protections from federal action to deport them when their visas expire.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon should keep it’s promise to the troops who haven’t been untruthful and, if the program is too expensive to be worthwhile, they should cancel it, but still keep the promises that they’ve made. It sucks when they unilaterally decide to break faith with veterans, it has happened to all of us at one time or another.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NPR reports that the Pentagon program designed to give troops an alternate path to citizenship, Military … Pentagon considers canceling program for immigrant troops<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[237],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-pentagon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}