On Thursday, the AP reported that a number of immigrants who joined the US military as part of a special program are being abruptly discharged.

The program is called MAVNI (Military Accessions Vital to National Interest) and it allows for non-citizens to enter our armed services if they fill gaps that we urgently need, such as foreign languages or medical skills. In the process, they may become citizens. It sounds like a win-win to me, and indeed the program has been highly successful, enjoying support from both sides of the aisle.

But as the New York Times describes it, some of these valuable specialists are now “being cut even as the Army has been unable to meet its 2018 recruiting goals.” Some are even in danger of being deported.

Margaret Stock, the former West Point law professor who won a MacArthur fellowship for, among other things, leading the development of the MAVNI program, estimated in September that hundreds of recruits could be affected by this policy shift:

“It’s a dumpster fire ruining people’s lives. The magnitude of incompetence is beyond belief,” she said. “We have a war going on. We need these people.”

These are not Trump’s rapists and murderers pouring in from Mexico. They are not drug runners smuggling contraband from Central America. They are not even the dangerous PG-13 gang members who are still being held in cages at the border.  These are people who are here legally, who we asked to be here, and who trusted our word that they would be protected.

All of the pretenses for why we need aggressive immigration reform have now been dropped.  

From Coriolanus:

Have the power still
To banish your defenders

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

They prove unfit leaders who ban the soldiers.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2018 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Anagram, Politics, President Trump, Shakespeare, Social Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.