Beware, America's Illegal Immigrant Army

Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois has recently endorsed using illegal immigrants to fill the recruitment gap in the armed services.

This could spell disaster for the United States and history indicates it could have catastrophic consequences.

Unfortunately, Durbin’s proposal is already partially in place (albeit not to the extent he desires). Illegal immigrants can, in many cases, join the armed forces. There is a variety of legal speed bumps one has to traverse but the result is that an illegal immigrant can join the service as an enlisted, although he is forbidden from becoming an officer.

Congressman Ruben Gallego, who is currently running for Senate in Arizona against Kari Lake, has proposed legislation that would expand access to the military for illegal aliens. The program he proposes would allow DACA recipients to become U.S. citizens upon completion of military service.

DACA is an Obama-era program that allows illegal immigrants who were brought to America as children to remain in the U.S.

Gallego’s proposal is peculiar given the fact that many DACA recipients are now beyond combat age. Most military enlistment occurs between the ages of 18 and 25. While some are still in this age range, many DACA recipients are now in their late 30s or early 40s.

Further, Gallego’s bill strongly resembles the ill-fated Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) program. MAVNI was a recruitment initiative, started by the Bush Administration, open to all combat-age foreigners who wanted to become U.S. citizens through service. Almost instantly Obama (and Trump) suspended the program, with the latter discharging numerous MAVNI recruits over national security concerns.

While MAVNI is a recent example of a failed program similar to what Durbin is proposing, historical examples are more startling. The use of legions of foreign-born nationals has repeatedly led to atrocities against Americans.

During the Civil War, the Union faced a similar recruitment problem to today. Many Northerners did not want to fight a war they saw as pointless and/or amoral at best.

The Union installed a draft of citizens but even this could not supply the requisite men to prosecute a war against an impassioned South. The North came to rely on drafting Irish and German immigrants to supply the war effort. Some of these immigrants, especially the Irish, rioted against this draft and provoked the New York Draft Riots–– the deadliest civil disturbance in American history.

However, many more immigrants fought for the Union than rioted. Roughly a third of Union forces were foreign-born, Time Magazine reports. Without these troops, it is near-certain the Union would have had to take a different approach to the war than it did. It is likely the North would have been forced to take a more gentle approach.

(The Burning of Atlanta, ree-imagined by AI for 2024)

Although this immigrant class can not be solely blamed for the atrocities committed against the South, they did take part in these transgressions and they supplied the Union with the capability to commit them. This included the rape of Southern women, the torture of mothers and children, the burning of much of the Carolinas, Alabama and Georgia, a region-wide intentional starvation of civilians, looting of personal property, the deaths of over 300,000 Confederate soldiers and civilians, and the crushing of the class of Virginians that produced many of the founding fathers including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

There was some precedent for this. The British brought in German “Hessians” during the American Revolution. These Teutonic mercenaries comprised about a quarter of British ground forces. They were well known for their brutality and barbarism against Americans.

However, these mercenaries did not fight as the Irish did for any sort of long-term stake in the United States.

While they set a precedent for foreign-born troops being used to prosecute a war against Americans on American soil, U.S. citizens have never experienced anything on the order of magnitude of what Southerners saw during the Civil War.

When Time magazine proclaims “Immigrants Won The Civil War,” they are correct but not in the way they think. Nothing other than man–– neither machine nor device–– could have enabled what happened to the South.

Moreover, it seems likely that the horrific nature of what the South experienced was only made possible by using a stock of troops who had no emotional, ancestral, or historical connection to the place they were attacking.

(Maj. General Patrick Cleburne)

This is not to say that all foreigners are prone to commit atrocities against Americans or Southerners. Some Irishmen, like Maj. General Patrick Cleburne, fought for Dixie and was never accused of war crimes. However, these cases were fewer and further between.

Indeed, other countries even saw the moral outrage of what President Lincoln was doing to the South.

L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s papal newspaper, editorialized on behalf of the Confederacy. Pope Pius is widely reported to have been sympathetic to the South and he maintained an ongoing communication with President Jefferson Davis even after the war. Father John Bannon, an Irish Catholic Priest, campaigned across Ireland to warn immigrants of how the Union would use them if they boarded a federally-funded ship to the U.S.

(Father John Bannon)

Father Bannon likewise condemned what he saw as the immorality in the Union’s actions. He was met with some degree of success, yet it was not enough to reverse what had already been done.

While the immigrants used in the Civil War were not illegal immigrants like those Durbin wants to use for the armed services, this distinction of legality is immaterial in this context. Neither would have the primitive, subconscious, almost inexhaustible connection to a land, people, and nation that a native-born citizen would.

(Robert E Lee, as painted by AI)

We ought to remember that Robert E. Lee refused a high-ranking position with the Union, fighting for the Confederacy instead, despite his objections to slavery, because he would not fight against his home state of Virginia.

Of course, not every military recruit will have the passion for the homeland that General Lee did, but we ought to make sure we draw our pool of servicemen from places where that sort of protective and paternal response is the most likely; to do otherwise would be fatal.

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