For the first time since the Vietnam war, the Pentagon will begin recruiting immigrants with temporary visas into the military. The new effort will begin as a pilot program for Army recruits, but the Pentagon expects to expand the program into all branches of the military, providing as many as 14,000 recruits a year. The immigrant recruitment program would help solve the military's chronic troop shortages caused by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Showing the military's regional priorities and sites of potential U.S. military engagement, Julia Preston of the New York Times writes: "The Army’s one-year pilot program will begin in New York City to recruit about 550 temporary immigrants who speak one or more of 35 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Igbo (a tongue spoken in Nigeria), Kurdish, Nepalese, Pashto, Russian and Tamil. Spanish speakers are not eligible." Under a statute introduced by the Bush administration, immigrant-soldiers can apply for citizenship on the first day of active service.

One Army recruiter interviewed on the streets of Brooklyn by the New York Times said, "We’re going to give people the opportunity to be part of the United States who are dying to be part of this country and they weren’t able to before now." 

"Dying" to be part of this country? The military recruiter perhaps could have chosen his words more carefully.

Another group of people "dying" to be part of the United States are the thousands of mostly Mexican and Central American migrants braving the dangerous land journey across the Rio Grande. Last year, nearly 400 people lost their lives trying to cross into El Norte, according to the Border Patrol – another 1,263 had to be rescued.

According to the AP, the Border Patrol has resorted to music in an attempt to stem the tide of clandestine crossings, releasing a full CD of corridos warning about death and deceit in the long journey north. Corridos are hugely popular Mexican norteña ballads, a genre onto itself, with stories about any number of things. In recent years, off-shoots of the genre include the narco-corridos, which tell glorified stories about the exploits of drug traffickers.

The Border Patrol's CD is called "Migracorridos," after "La Migra," as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, formerly the INS, is pejoratively known by immigrants. Trying to maintain the music's street-cred, the Border Patrol tried to keep a lid on the fact that it was behind the CD, which was commissioned to a Latino advertising agency based in Washington D.C. The Border Patrol won't reveal how much it spent on the project.

Apparently, the songs have been well-received by local radio stations and listeners in Mexican states with high incidences of undocumented emigration. 

Undocumented migrants in the U.S. are barred from participating in the Pentagon's recruitment program.