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WHO FIGHTS

Substitution, Commutation, and “Green Card Troops”1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2008

Cara Wong
Cara Wong*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
*
Professor Cara Wong, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. E-mail: carawong@uiuc.edu
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Abstract

In discussions of political obligation, it is commonly assumed that duties follow from citizenship. However, the performance of a duty by aliens can lead to citizenship status in at least one critical case: service by noncitizen soldiers. While politicians and pundits recently have called citizenship a just reward for bearing arms and these “green card troops” another example of immigrant entrepreneurship in the United States, there is a good deal of ideological ambivalence about the policy. A clear discussion of its merits is crucial, particularly because in upending the traditionally accepted relationship between obligation and membership in a community, it gives new meaning to citizenship; it also forces a choice between our egalitarian and civic republican values. In this essay, I provide a theoretical framework for evaluating the policy normatively, as well as a political analysis of why—regardless of one's normative stance—the practice of granting citizenship for military service is likely to continue into the future.

Keywords

CitizenshipObligationMilitary ServiceCommutationSubstitution
Type
STATE OF THE ART
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , Spring 2007 , pp. 167 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2007

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