Green Card Soldier: Between Model Immigrant and Security Threat

by Sofya Aptekar

An in-depth and troubling look at a little-known group of immigrants—non-citizen soldiers who enlist in the US military.

While the popular image of the US military is one of citizen soldiers protecting their country, the reality is that nearly 5 percent of all first-time military recruits are noncitizens. Their reasons for enlisting are myriad, but many are motivated by the hope of gaining citizenship in return for their service. In Green Card Soldier , Sofya Aptekar talks to more than seventy noncitizen soldiers from twenty-three countries, including some who were displaced by conflict after the US military entered their homeland. She identifies a disturbing the US military’s intervention in foreign countries drives migration, which in turn supplies the military with a cheap and desperate labor pool—thereby perpetuating the cycle.

As Aptekar discovers, serving in the US military is no guarantee against deportation, and yet the promise of citizenship and the threat of deportation are the carrot and stick used to discipline noncitizen soldiers. Viewed at various times as security threats and members of a model minority, immigrant soldiers sometimes face intense discrimination from their native-born colleagues and superiors. Their stories—stitched through with colonial legacies, white supremacy, exploitation, and patriarchy—show how the tensions between deservingness and suspicion shape their enlistment, service, and identities. Giving voice to this little-heard group of immigrants, Green Card Soldier shines a cold light on the complex workings of US empire, globalized militarism, and citizenship.

Genres: Nonfiction

346 pages, Paperback

Published May 2, 2023

Reviews

[Margaret · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don’t waste your time on this book. The blurbs on the jacket have nothing to do with the content of the book. The thesis is laughable and unsupported by any evidence (Aptekar’s thesis is that the US invades other countries in order to obtain “military workers” = soldiers for the U.S. Armed Forces). She interviews dozens of “military workers” but they don’t say anything that you haven’t read already in other, better written books (“military service is stressful and physically demanding, the paperwork to get veterans’ benefits can be daunting”). The book is also full of factual and legal errors and needed a much better editor (example: a scholar she quotes named Jeremy Slack is called “Jeremy Stock” in the book). Without providing any argument why, Aptekar recommends that the US military should be defunded, which policy recommendation will presumably solve all the world’s problems.

[Mia Huynh · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Indigenous identity [of military soldiers] set up the complexities at the intersection of model immigrant and security threat"

Green Card Soldier is a novel by Sofya Aptekar about the complexities and struggles of obtaining citizenship, proving loyalty to one's country and duty, and the prejudices that migrant soldiers face. In the United States, the military has had a long history of using migrants as a substantial part of their labor force, yet fails to properly provide them the rights of citizens and/or make the process of obtaining citizenship dramatically more difficult (despite various promises). Aptekar discusses why one joins the military (whether it's due to citizenship or not), the prejudices and stigmatization one faces in the military, and what happens to migrant soldiers (especially those without citizenship) once they are veterans. Despite holding a very promising outlook, the book fails to offer anything novel.

Throughout the book, I was fairly disappointed by the lack of a theoretical framework or a proposed analytical viewpoint of which to discuss this broader issue. For the majority of her writing, Aptekar recounts dozens of interviews and stories to support her nominal—and at times repetitive—points. The lack of organization between the stories renders them confusing and unsupportive of her broader points in that she throws in multiple snippets of individual stories for a single point, and you often forget who is who. Out of her whole book, I only enjoyed the last two chapters in which she throughly dived into the MAVNI program and discusses deported veterans through a small handful of stories that were all well-developed in the text. If you were to read this for academic reasons, I would only recommend those two chapters. The rest can be easily found from other sources that present it in a more concise and practical manner.