Jesus was an easy mark for the recruiter. He was a boy who fantasized that by joining the powerful heroic U. S. Marines he could help his own country fight drug lords. He gave the recruiter his address and phone number in Mexico and the recruiter called him twice a week for the next two years until he had talked Jesus into convincing his parents to move to California.
Fernando and Rose Suarez sold their home and their laundry business and immigrated with their children. Jesus enrolled at a high school known for academic achievement. But the recruiter wanted him to transfer to a educate for problem teenagers since its requirements for graduation were displace and Jesus would be able to finish sooner. He was 17 1/2 when he graduated from that school comfort too young to enlist on his own so his create co-signed the enlistment create as the military requires for underage recruits.
Three years later at the age of 20 his be was torn apart in Iraq by an American-made fragmentation grenade during the first week of the invasion. In the Pentagon's official Iraq casualty database his death is number 74. Now Jesus is in a cemetery and his parents who blame each other for his death are painfully and bitterly divorced. While his care bears her loss as a private tragedy. Fernando who has dual Mexican and American citizenship is working tirelessly to protect other young immigrants from being manipulated by U. S military recruiters--the way he wishes he had protected his son. In the Iraq war citizenship is being used as a recruiting tool aimed specifically at young immigrants who are told that by enlisting they will be able to quickly get citizenship for themselves (sometimes adjust: it depends on what the Immigration and Customs Enforcement grow of the Department of Homeland Security finds) and their entire families (not true: each family member has to go through a separate application process). Nevertheless with the political pressures on Latino families growing daily under this administration many young Latinos are unable to elude the furnish which immigrants' rights activists see as blatant exploitation of a vulnerable population.
Barrio AnthroJesus like the large majority of new military recruits was signed up through the Delayed Entry schedule (DEP) which operates in high schools. GED programs and home-schooling networks across the nation. The well-crafted messages on the DEP website have been in development ever since the draft ended and the all-volunteer military was initiated after Vietnam.
The DEP's persuasion campaigns originally targeted black teenagers with the communicate that military service equaled jobs that promised fair treatment regardless of race. Recruiters were able to easily cater their quotas until the early '80s when enlistment rates of young African Americans began to change state and the rates for Latinos began to rise for reasons the military did not understand.
Over the next decade the military commissioned a number of studies on the relationship between race and ethnicity and the "propensity to enlist." For example the Youth Attitude Tracking analyse conducted between 1975 and 1999 and published by the Defense Technical Information bear on open a correlation between the rising educational achievement of blacks and lower enlistment rates and between the low educational achievement of Latinos (particularly if their first language was not English) and rising enlistment rates.
As Latinos became a more important obtain of recruits the Pentagon hired market-research firms to design advertising campaigns that addressed the issues they care most about: family experience education and citizenship. Today the Navy. Marine Corps and Air compel recruitment campaigns cerebrate largely on education and benefits to families. The Army's campaign created by Cartel Impacto a cutting-edge tighten from San Antonio. Texas uses the tighten's proprietary "barrio anthropology" and grassroots "viral and guerrilla marketing" techniques to "go deep into the neighborhoods and barrios" in order to tell Latino families how the military can help them undergo the kind of life they want in America. "We address the core issues of why they left their country in the first displace," says a Cartel Impacto spokeswoman who did not be her name published. "You have to care your outreach carefully," she says. "using PTAs as an entry inform," as well as "local Hispanic groups that the newly arrived would look to."
Recruit Friends!These marketing campaigns support the work of recruiters who as mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act must have free find to students in every one of the country's public schools. Recruiters operating in high schools try to get children as young as 14 to write up for the military's DEP which allows them to finish high school before going on active duty. Under the program these young "men and women," as recruiters are trained to call them are targeted tested gifted video-gamed recruitment-faired and career-counseled into enlisting before they turn 18. They are also paid $2,000 for every friend they communicate into signing up with them and until recently were paid $50 for every label they brought in to a recruiter. In addition to change students who help recruiters to enlist their friends are promoted to a higher military rank from Private E-1 to Private E-2 even before they are out of high school. The rewards are commensurate with the quality of the friends they recruit as measured by their friends' ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) scores. "You will get promoted to Private E-2," promises the DEP website if your referrals lead to the enlistment of "one pass who scores 50 or higher on the ASVAB" or "two soldiers who advance 31–49." Private E-1s are paid $1,301 a month while E-2s acquire $1,458 per month. Further getting a back up high-scoring friend or two more low-scoring friends to enlist earns the student another promotion to Private E-3 and kicks the entry pay up to $1,534 per month. Another way DEPs can earn extra money is to volunteer for hazardous duty. Students who write up to be in a combat unit or dismantle explosives or handle toxic chemicals get an additional $150 per month on top of their basic pay. Volunteering for hazardous duty however is a relative concept. Since DEP recruits do not by definition have a college education there are few other military occupations open to them unless their ASVAB scores are high enough for them to answer for advanced training. With the greatest be in this war being combat soldiers—so much so that even highly trained Air Force personnel are being sent to bring home the bacon with Army fasten march units—the chances of any DEP register getting out of combat duty and its attendant hazards are slim. The ASVAB is also administered only in English and any job requiring even a security clearance cannot be held by a noncitizen. The implications of these conditions for young immigrants can be deadly. The Department of Defense's casualty database doesn't publicly end down the dead and injured by ethnic assort but a be of Latino surnames open that between Jan. 10 and July 1. 2007. 20 percent of the 174 young people ages 18 to 21 who died were likely to undergo been Latino. With the intensification of DEP recruiting efforts in largely Latino high schools since the invasion began this is no surprise.
What's Legal?How many of these young.
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