[LINK] Military migration

[rfmcdonald]

Writing for The Times, defence editor Michael Evans examines, in "How British Army is fast becoming foreign legion", how foreign recruitment has taken off spectacularly for the British military.

THE Army has stopped actively recruiting Commonwealth and foreign soldiers because the numbers joining up have risen by nearly 3,000 per cent in seven years. Imposing a cap on the number of Commonwealth and foreign soldiers allowed to serve in each infantry regiment has been discussed by army chiefs.

“It is after all supposed to be the British Army, not the Commonwealth Army,” one defence source said.

However, in recent years, many regiments would not have survived without the influx of recruits from the Commonwealth, particularly from Fiji, Jamaica, South Africa and Ghana, because of drastic manpower shortages. Soldiers from overseas now account for 6 per cent of the Army’s strength, rising to 9 per cent if the 3,000 Gurkhas recruited from Nepal are taken into account.

[. . .]

The problem for army chiefs is that the number of applicants from the Commonwealth has risen dramatically at the same time as recruits from within the United Kingdom have dropped significantly. General Sir Mike Jackson, Chief of the General Staff, revealed yesterday that in the last financial year recruitment had fallen 7 per cent short of the target.

Yet the Commonwealth figures show that numbers have risen from 205 in 1998 to about 6,000 this year. There are currently 5,500 Commonwealth and overseas soldiers serving in the UK Field Army and another 700 recruits are under training.

This isn't altogether surprising. At least in Canada, and I suspect elsewhere in the developed world, service in the military offers fewer benefits and more stresses than civilian jobs for many of the people who otherwise would have joined. For immigrants, though, military service in the ranks of a stable and functioning military may well be attractive. This was bound to happen.