National service and the path to citizenship

By Sally Herrin

You can accomplish a lot, if you don’t care who came up with the idea in the first place. That’s a paraphrase, and it might be Harry Truman who said it first. I don’t much care, just as I don’t care who came up with the idea of national service as a path to citizenship for immigrants. I like this idea. The more I think about it, the more I like it. I have my own ideas about what ought to constitute national service. I’d favor a program fashioned on a New Deal model to include public works, especially conservation, and anything that makes the lives of poor children better. In the meantime, though, I’d settle for service in a branch of the U.S. military.

Governor Lamm’s thoughtful piece in the first issue of Prairie Fire rightly figured that taxes paid by immigrants to the U.S. don’t come close to defraying the expense of educating immigrant children, though of course immigrants (legal and not so much) do pay taxes, contrary to anti-immigrant mythology. National service seems like, hands down, the sincerest form of restitution (where that’s an issue, as in the case of illegalities) and a bone-deep investment in the greater good of the society any immigrant hopes to join.

The Heinlein model?

In fact, I like the idea of national service as a path to citizenship for immigrants so much that I am starting to like the idea of national service as a path to citizenship, period. And I don’t even care that I found that idea in Starship Troopers. Let me add that I mean Starship Troopers the book, by distinguished novelist Robert Heinlein, and not so much the movie of the same name, based only loosely on the book and widely held to rule/rock among 19-year-old males who have had a great deal to drink.

Heinlein’s book is a classic bildungsroman, or coming of age novel. I like the German word, which reminds me that coming of age ought to be more than a mere entitlement or an escape from limits and rules. The German word evokes for me the idea of building a young woman or man; not just the emancipation of a grown child, but a defining experience, the decision to be a player, the stepping up to the plate of an emerging adult-at-last, ready to take that first real swing…

I teach in a community college, where I have the opportunity to observe the rich pageant of teens becoming adults on an hourly basis. Many of my students are blooming like a hill of wild roses (though they would be disgusted to hear me say so), but the luck of the Irish brings me my share of potty mouths and barbarians, too, and those who fall somewhere in between. And then there are the veterans. And I have to say I like what I see in the students who have served their country.

As I wrote the early draft of this piece, Time magazine’s cover story (Sept. 10, 2007) made the case for national service as a way to bolster the foundations of the Republic by creating an active, engaged citizenship with an owner/ operator’s pride and care. Though I oppose the war in Iraq, the evidence before me of the good effect of military service for many is undeniable. Even among the very young 19- and 20-year-old ex-soldiers who return to school, the veterans come with a toolkit of adult virtues, including seriousness of purpose, steady self-possession, appropriate boundaries, focus, perspective, tolerance, skepticism and patience, which most of their age-peers have only begun to want for themselves, much less master.

In Heinlein’s novel, the world is at permanent war with an alien race, and full citizenship, including the voting franchise, is only for those who serve and who therefore can, it is held, be trusted to put the welfare of others ahead of self where necessary. Anyone who does not choose to serve is a legal resident, free to live, marry and divorce, have children, own property, work, trade and so on; that person just cannot vote.

This idea appeals to me greatly. If U.S. citizenship is a pearl beyond compare (and if you think it’s not, you’re not paying attention), why should this prize come as if in a cereal box, just a lucky accident of birth to people who get their news from Fox and vote based on who’d make them feel most comfortable at a barbeque?

Dream a little dream

Do I think I’ll live to see a national service requirement for full U.S. citizenship? That would take a level of bipartisan political vision that is not, frankly, foreseeable. Still, permit me a wistful sigh for a project that I think could be profoundly socializing for thousands of young adults and, not incidentally, make America good, maybe great.

Poor youth, urban youth, rural youth, youth of the evaporating middle classes, youth at risk everywhere in our country are not just slipping through the cracks. As manufacturing jobs, technology jobs, even service jobs move offshore, young people clearly feel the very earth crumbling under their feet, and they see an increasingly impassable divide opening before them. Thirty percent of Americans under 45 today will never own homes (Lamm, Prairie Fire, vol. 1, no. 2). These young folks have less and less interest in civic life, much less civic duty, because they often can’t see what’s in it for them.

Imagine a U.S.A. where every young person, at 18, was assured of a place in that society, attainable by showing up, signing up and carrying through. I’m all for boot camps—not brutal, but plain communal living, clean food and high expectations, rational discipline, meaningful training, working hard and well with others, and learning to leave a place better than you found it.

Imagine a 98 percent job placement rate, or more education first if you like, and heck, while we’re dreaming, how about health-care benefits? Imagine no more tragic bridge collapses because of prudent maintenance of our great national infrastructure, saving not just lives but billions and trillions of tax dollars over the coming century.
Imagine support services for the poor and working poor, like the great federal day-care centers of World War II where Rosie the Riveter left her babies, knowing they’d be safe and
happy. Imagine an America with beautiful highways, magnificent high schools, neighborhood garden plots, restored historic landmarks, replanted habitat, reinvigorated forests, renewed lakes and rivers, accomplished with the labor of the rising generation, who will remember their “time in the service” as the time of their lives.

We cannot be great, somebody said, if we cannot first be good. It is important to give people the opportunity to behave the way they ought to do. With respect to the so-called Greatest Generation, their richly earned GI benefits for education and housing played no small part in their success (Lamm, op cit) and in their greatness.

Making national service the path to full membership in the community, done right, can be good for the citizen; good for the practice of democracy; good for the society and the nation; good, no doubt, for the world. If we valued our young adults the way we ought, we could find the political will to offer them a real social and economic future. Ditto the teeming masses, yearning to be free.

Provided, of course, they’d be willing to enlist.

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