New American Soldier

This short documentary profiling three soldiers focuses on noncitizen immigrants serving in the U.S. armed forces (hardly a recent phenomenon, since the practice of recruiting foreigners to fight in American conflicts dates back to the Revolutionary War). Today, some five percent of service men and women were born elsewhere, with half of those holding green cards. Military service can be a fast track to citizenship (the process can take as little as six months), which influenced the first two subjects in signing up: one, a young man from Ghana who's using his new citizenship primarily to resettle his family in the United States (he speaks ruefully about renouncing his lifelong pledge of allegiance to his native country), and the other a young woman from Peru who saw the Army as an affordable way to earn a medical school degree that would have otherwise been beyond her means. In contrast, the third example is a Mexican-born youth who enlisted in the Army but was killed in Iraq before starting the naturalization process; a lapse in completing the paperwork prevented him from earning posthumous citizenship. Created by University of California–Berkeley students Emma Cott and Anna Belle Peevey, New American Soldier raises some interesting questions—but more, in fact, than its brief running time can answer. A strong optional purchase. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)