How Are Foreign-Born Military Spouses Doing?

Jennifer Barnhill is a columnist for Military.com writing about military families.

Being a military spouse is challenging, and for foreign-born spouses, there are even more stressors to keeping a family running -- applying for work permits, passing citizenship tests, cannonballing into new American and military cultures, to name a few.

But it's really hard to know how foreign-born spouses are doing, because we don't often ask them.

We don't even really know how many foreign-born spouses there are. While the Defense Department collects data to understand the race of military spouses, it does not ask them about their nationality or citizenship. In the 1980s, the Army noted that "more than 21% of Army spouses speak English only as a second language." Clearly, they represent a larger chunk of our community than we may know.

Seemingly simple things can add enormous hurdles for spouses trying to adapt.

"We don't drive, we walk, or we take the bus or we take the metro," said Juliette Ramberg de Ruyter, a Marine Corps spouse who was born in Sweden and is the founder of the Foreign Military Spouse Association (FMSA). "And now I was in Southern California biking on the freeway to go get groceries, and people were just staring at me, like, what are you doing?"

Her husband had to teach her how to drive in two weeks -- the time he had before deploying and leaving Ramberg de Ruyter alone in a new country. Ramberg de Ruyter founded FMSA, which boasts more than 4,000 members, in order to share resources and build community.

For Lydiah Owiti-Otienoh, a Kenyan-born lawyer, founder of the Foreign-Born Military Spouse Network and veteran Army spouse, the American interviewing process did not come naturally. She had an interview that she thought went well, but she didn't get the job. Instead, she got some advice.

"She was like, 'Why were you looking down the whole time? Why weren't you selling yourself?'" Owiti-Otienoh recalled. "Nobody teaches you any of these things. And if it were not for her, I probably would have not known that that's a really important cultural aspect to take into consideration. Now every time I'm in an interview, look straight and toot [my own] horn."

These and other experiences inspired Owiti-Otienoh to survey the community in 2023. She found that the concerns of foreign-born spouses were not unlike the concerns of American-born spouses; they struggled with unemployment (70%), but their employment struggles were often related to the transferring and evaluating of their international degrees (69%) and cultural differences (69%).

"I grew up 20 minutes from a big Army post, so I was familiar with the U.S. military," said Nadine Rodriguez, who met her now-husband while he was stationed in Germany with the Army. But this familiarity didn't make certain aspects of military life easier.

Although Rodriguez studied in the U.S., earning a degree in criminal justice, she quickly learned that using that degree while living in the states would not be easy, as not all careers are portable for military spouses, especially when they require security clearances.

"It wasn't just that it was harder for me to get a job," she said. "It's also harder to climb the ladder, because in my case, [higher-level positions] required me to have citizenship."

Another German-born Army spouse, Anja Velez, holds a degree in geography but ended up not working in that field. When she first arrived in the U.S., she took a job in research and now works in health-care staffing.

"I kind of just fell into it," Velez said. "And that's the other thing I feel like here, moving up the ladder is way easier. You don't need to go to school if you have a good work ethic."

It is clear that like American-born military spouses, there is no one-size-fits-all employment experience. Working while military-spousing is universally hard, but other things are harder for foreign-born spouses.

Sometimes, it is the small stuff, ordering deli meat in pounds vs. kilos. Sometimes, it is having to translate every word you speak in your head before you say it aloud. Other times, it is being stared at as you learn how to drive after being told biking on the freeway is crazy. Sometimes, it's the loneliness and isolation.

Yuko Robbins met her American husband while he was studying in Tokyo as a civilian, and he later joined the Army.

"Most people are friendly, but they are not familiar with talking with foreigners at all," Robbins said of her eventual move to Iowa with the military. "I'm the only one who is military in the neighborhood, and then they get together like every month or every week sometimes, but I was not invited. ... They are nice, but I was kind of lonely sometimes."

For those who come from big cities such as Tokyo, it is not hard to find activities to join to combat loneliness. So for Yuko, the discovery that she needed to reach out proactively to ask to join groups and events was foreign. "As I joined the military spouse crowd in Iowa, I learned that, oh, OK, I need to intentionally join something to make really good friends."

Then there are the legal differences.

"If you marry a foreign national, be aware that you won't have child custody rights," was one of the first and most distinctive things shared during an Area Orientation Brief (AOB) the first week I arrived in Atsugi, Japan -- my only experience of what living life as a foreigner. The AOB was designed to help acclimate American sailors and spouses to Japanese culture and life on the installation.

It struck me as odd that sailors were being given preemptive legal advice about hypothetical future children they would have with a partner they had not yet met. And if they did get married, they were also warned that "Japanese nationals don't have garbage disposals. We had a Japanese spouse put kitty litter down the drain, and it damaged plumbing for the entire building."

My time in Japan introduced me to countless Japanese spouses and local nationals, and none of them seemed the sort to put animal feces in a place where dishes were washed, and it bothered me that this was included in a safety brief. What they should have focused on was how to support a foreign-born spouse.

Military pay and benefits are often confusing, even to service members, but due to language and other cultural barriers, foreign-born spouses may be especially vulnerable to intimate partner violence (IPV) in the form of financial abuse. According to research conducted by Blue Star Families in 2021, 4% of active-duty respondents -- spouses and service members -- said their partner limited [their] access to financial accounts or withheld money.

"[Their] immediate reaction and wishes, of course, is to get out of there and go back home, take your child and start over and be in safety," said Ramberg de Ruyter. "You can't do that, because that would be kidnapping."

Luckily, of the nearly dozen foreign-born spouses I spoke to, none had experienced IPV, but without the data to understand these unique experiences, it is hard to say how prevalent this form of abuse may be.

A message that did come through loud and clear, though: Military life was hard, but overall was worth it.

Some spouses shared that their immigration was expedited by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)'s military division and that they used available resources, even if they were initially hard to find.

"I resented my husband for a long time," Rodriguez shared of her early experiences trying to work while moving every 2-3 years as a military spouse. "[Military life] brought me to where I am now. I probably would have never become self-employed otherwise. I probably would have been way too scared to step out of my comfort zone."