Foreign Students and Employees in US

Through a program called MAVNI — Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, the military offers US citizenship to those in the United States temporarily and legally as a student, exchange visitor, or employee of a US company, or their dependents. In other words, MAVNI provides a legal way to obtain expedited citizenship without first obtaining a green card.

Program Criteria

In order to meet the program criteria, the applicant must be:

  1. a medical professional or have knowledge of one of the required languages (discussed below);
  2. between the ages of 17 and 34;
  3. able to meet certain physical and testing requirements;
  4. a high school graduate;
  5. physically present in the US for at least the last two years and not travelled outside the US for more than 90 days at one time;
  6. in a specified visa status (discussed below); and
  7. not affiliated with another country’s military.

The benefit is that upon passing the training program the person can be naturalized and become a US citizen. He or she will be obliged to commit to working in the military for at least four years.

Foreign Languages

The following languages are in demand by the MAVNI program: Albanian, Amharic, Arabic Algerian, Arabic Modern Standard, Arabic Iraqi, Arabic Egyptian, Arabic Jordanian, Arabic Levantine, Arabic Libyan, Arabic Maghrebi, Arabic Syrian, Arabic Palestinian, Arabic Sudanese, Arabic Moroccan, Arabic Yemeni, Azerbaijani, Arabic Lebanese, Arabic Tunisian, Bengali, Burmese, Cambodian-Khmer, Cebuano, Chinese Cantonese, Chinese Mandarin, Czech, French, Georgian, Haitian-Creole, Hausa, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Indonesian, Korean, Kurdish-Kurmanje, Kurdish-Sorani, Lao, Malay, Malayalam, Moro, Nepalese, Pashto-Afghan, Persian Dari, Persian Farsi, Polish, Portuguese Brazilian, Portuguese European, Punjabi, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sindhi, Somali, Swahili, Sinhalese, Tagalog, Tadjik, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Turkmen, Urdu, Uzbek, Yoruba.

There is a quota on the number of applicants who can enroll based on knowledge of a foreign language, with each language allocated a certain number of applicants.

Status in US

In order to qualify, a person must be in the US in any of the following statuses: asylum/refugees;

The program is an annual program and can be cancelled. The rules and language demands also change each year.