Would you support a pathway to citizenship through military service? 20 years in a combat MOS would work for me, what do you think?

Yes it is, In My opinion, a person who has already served this nation honorably as a member of the US Armed Forces has earned that citizenship and already proved a devotion to the United States with that service. I find it reasonable to go an extra mile to assist them on anything that is required in obtaining that citizenship. We already owe them thanks for their service in the US Armed Forces.

Complete your enlistment period, or complete a combat tour, it also removes most of the cost required in a standard citizenship application. It's also very easy to get legal immigration status if you try to enlist as an illegal. You volunteer to serve this country, you should be eligible to be a citizen provided you serve with honor.

Cynthia Croft - we are blessed to have the support of our Aussie friends! Thanks for your support of service members and veterans.

You're right that we're pretty much down to semantics, though since so many items can hinge on little differences in terminology, I do personally consider it important. Formally, DACA is only a *deferral* from immigration enforcement, not a legalized status, and it can be revoked at any time without even the minimal due-process requirements that VISA holders get (by, for example, the new President or his DHS Secretary) because it exists solely via a DHS policy implementation memorandum to CBP, ICE, and USCIS (it's not even an Executive Order, let alone a law).

So, pedantically speaking (I love legal nuance), that's not actually a true "legal" status - they never actually stop being in the "unlawful" status while covered by DACA, and the MAVNI program merely has an *exception* to its legal status requirement in that one case (as well as an exception in the sense that DACA cannot pursue citizenship while other MAVNIs can) - but from a functional standpoint it is obviously essentially the same thing to a recruiter, so I can absolutely understand your stance in treating it that way.

MAJ (Join to see) - I don't think MANVI includes translators anymore. Looks like the current skills that qualify for MANVI are medical professionals, ie; Doctors, surgeons, dentists. Very exclusive, so in reality there are not many people that hold a DACA status that qualify for MANVI, or would even need to enlist as a pathway for citizenship. There are undocumented immigrants that graduate from Harvard. Adding DACA as one of eligible residency status makes it one of the methods for a select group of people to become documented legal residents with a pathway to citizenship. Being voluntary, the reality is that MANVI only produces a fraction the of qualified medical skills accessions it is targeted for.
Given the number of undocumented immigrants that apply for and are granted DACA status in this country, only a very tiny fraction of those are eligible for MAVI.

MAVNI does still process a limited number linguists of multiple types (though it has become more limited), but the gist of what you wrote is true: very few DACAs get into MAVNI, and very few MAVNI come from DACA. But, importantly, they *are* non-zero, which was kind of the point of my original comment.

In recent years MAVNI has definitely re-oriented toward medical skills, and less about languages, as you point out. And, as you suggest, most DACAs that do get in are because of those medical skills needs, but that's not so much because of the shift away from languages in MAVNI as it is that most DACAs are from Latin America and those languages are common enough in the armed forces that MAVNI never needed them at any point. In other words, from the pool of DACAs, it was always going to be the professional skills, not languages, that were looked for.

As for whether MAVNI would give a DACA a chance of citizenship: yes and no, or to be more specific, not directly. For MAVNI traditional immigrant categories, they will almost all get citizenship before the end of their basic training (or at the very least, by the end of the follow-on advanced training). But DACA was specifically set up to not be a path to citizenship. Therefore, if a DACA individual used MAVNI to get a green card, they could theoretically get citizenship down the road, but at the least it would take a considerable time, a stark difference from the rest of MAVNI. I'm not sure if anyone has successfully done that, though, as DACA has only been around for about 4-5 years, which wouldn't normally be enough time.

MAJ (Join to see) - Well sir, I guess I will settle on getting the gist right. The gist being that there are NO enlistments into the U.S. Military without some minimum legal documented residency status at the time of application. DACA is authorized and recognized by the federal government to legally work in the United States. Perhaps there are debates on the legality of granting this status to those that qualify, but it doesn't change the fact that people holding a valid DACA card are Legal documented immigrant residents. Therefore, a qualified MANVI applicant is not an illegal alien. Btw, to my knowledge, MANVI applicants do not go to regular basic training and certainly not AIT. Because they are medical professionals, they follow the same commission path as other medical professionals who enlist AMEDD. The MANVI and 09L translators don't/didn't follow the traditional training path of BCT & AIT either. There job is/was to be unit translators/civil affairs/culture experts in theater, not combatants. Also, to add, linguists and translators are two different things. I want to be clear not to confuse the two. Linguists have an MI role, and hold a MI MOS. Translators do not, they just translate for commanders in the field.