One of the surest paths to citizenship is to enlist in the U.S. Armed Forces and fight in a foreign war. Sergeant Ramdeo Singh, a Queens resident who treated wounded American soldiers as an Army nurse at Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo in 1999, says he picked the wrong war.

Last week, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled that Sergeant Singh’s service in Kosovo does not qualify him for automatic citizenship, even though noncitizens who have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001, or those who fought in the Persian Gulf War between 1990 and 1991, do qualify.

The District Court judge’s decision relies on the labyrinthine laws that govern immigrants involved in combat for America. Legal permanent residents with green cards may enter the U.S. Armed Forces, and the president may grant automatic citizenship to any such immigrants actively serving by issuing an executive order designating a specific time period as one of “armed conflict with a hostile foreign force.”

In 1999, President Clinton issued Executive Order 13119, which designated Yugoslavia, Albania, the Adriatic Sea, and the Ionian Sea as areas in which “Armed Forces of the United States are and have been engaged in combat.”

Possibly due to an oversight by the president’s lawyers, the executive order applied only for the purposes of an IRS code that would give veterans who fought there certain tax breaks. The order does not specifically mention citizenship for legal aliens.

Because of that omission, Judge Sandra Townes of the Eastern District of New York ruled that the president’s order is of no help to immigrants who served in Kosovo and still do not have their citizenship, such as Sergeant Singh.

“It may not seem like common sense to the average person, but it’s the way Congress wrote the law,” an immigration lawyer who teaches at West Point on the topic of immigrants in the Armed Forces, Margaret Stock, said. “Congress made a distinction between wartime service and peacetime service, and the president gets to decide which is which. And for purposes of immigration law, the president decided that Kosovo was not wartime.”

Sergeant Singh says he is baffled by the idea that his service in Kosovo is somehow unequal to other noncitizens’ service in the Persian Gulf War, Iraq, or Afghanistan.

“I earned my citizenship,” Sergeant Singh said. “I bore arms for this country. I earned it. I supported the Constitution of this country and I supported freedom.”

Ms. Stock says she can think of only two reasons that President Clinton would have failed to issue an executive order expediting citizenship: Either the president did not think the conflict involved enough soldiers to justify the order, or his lawyers simply forgot to issue it.

“It was probably a slipup, an oversight,” Ms. Stock said. “Most presidents think it’s a good thing to expedite citizenship when people are getting shot at, but I can’t tell you why President Clinton didn’t do it in this case.”

Ms. Stock said presidents usually invoke the law only for large conflicts, so the president’s staff may have decided that Kosovo did not involve enough troops to justify the war label.

A spokesman for President Clinton, Jay Carson, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Smaller American conflicts such as those in Grenada, Haiti, and Somalia also never received executive orders granting citizenship to legal aliens. The Armed Forces had more than 37,000 people committed to the Kosovo conflict during the 1999 bombing campaign, which lasted 78 days. Several thousand American ground troops remained in the region afterward as peacekeepers.

It is unclear how many of those 37,000 troops were noncitizens. Most would not be affected by Judge Townes’s decision, as they would have already used their green cards to gain citizenship by this time, according to Ms. Stock. Currently, about 35,000 noncitizens serve in the Armed Forces, according to Pentagon statistics recently reported in the Boston Globe.

When presidents do issue an expedited citizenship order, it does not go to waste.

President Bush issued an order in 2002, granting expedited citizenship to any noncitizens who have served on active duty for at least one day during the war on terror, which he designated as beginning with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

More than 33,750 noncitizens serving on active duty have taken advantage of the order and been naturalized since 2001, according to a fact sheet issued on August 1 by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a Department of Homeland Security body that Sergeant Singh took to court.

A spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services, Bill Wright, declined to comment on Sergeant Singh’s case.

Sergeant Singh, 41, left Trinidad for America in 1981. In 1993, he enlisted in the Army using a conditional green card based on his inclusion in a class action that allowed him to apply for amnesty. The conditional green card was never made permanent, even when Sergeant Singh reenlisted, this time for active duty, in 1998.

Sergeant Singh said he didn’t know when he reenlisted whether serving in Kosovo would help him gain citizenship — he merely wanted to serve.

“I wanted to be over there with other soldiers,” he said.

To Sergeant Singh, his 179 days at the 67th Combat Support Hospital felt a lot like being in a war, regardless of what the courts say.
“Work there was 14 to 16 hours per day. We were taking care of civilians, soldiers from our platoon, locals, German and British soldiers, because we had the best team there,” Sergeant Singh said.

“My unit set up a tent with 40 bed units. In 30 days, we did 29 successful operations. We saved 29 lives in 30 days. Out motto was ‘we are here to save lives,'” he said.

Today, Sergeant Singh has no legal status in America. He works part time as a nurse to support his wife, who is also in the country illegally, and two children, ages 3 and 6. Sergeant Singh’s lawyer, Lawrence Linden, also a veteran, said the sergeant could be deported at any time if the government wished it.

In the end of her decision, Judge Townes expressed sympathy for Sergeant Singh’s situation: “As much as this Court might like to reward Singh for his years of distinguished service to this country, this Court cannot extend the scope of [the law] beyond the limits set by Congress and the President.”

Sergeant Singh and Mr. Linden are weighing the possibilities of appealing the decision to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. In the meantime, they are eschewing the goal of citizenship for the more modest target of reacquiring a green card for Sergeant Singh, based on his status in the same class action that initially allowed him to join the Army in 1993.