

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

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.<p>They would become citizens within months and could begin the process of sponsoring their spouses and parents for permanent residence straightaway.<p>This may be of interest to some of the many thousands of technology workers on H or L visas that don&#x27;t have a path to stay in the United States, but would like to.<p>A majority of these visa holders are from India and several Indian languages are on the list.<p>Speakers of the following languages are eligible for the program:<p>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&#x2F;Maranao&#x2F;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<p>Link to Department of Defense fact sheet:
http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.defense.gov&#x2F;news&#x2F;mavni-fact-sheet.pdf<p>Link to Army program, which accepted over 1000:
http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goarmy.com&#x2F;benefits&#x2F;additional-incentives&#x2F;mavni.html<p>Link to Air Force Special Forces program, which only accepted 2 recently:
http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.afsoc.af.mil&#x2F;Units&#x2F;AirForceSpecialOperationsAirWarfareCenter&#x2F;USAFSOS&#x2F;MAVNI.aspx
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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.

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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...

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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

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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.

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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.

