PC: US Foreign Legion

Would it have been possible at any time, for the US to form a French style foreign legion? Maybe during a period of isolationist sentiment, a foreign legion is formed to allow the US to wage foreign wars without risking US lives. The USFL would be headquartered outside CONUS to eliminate the possibility of a coup, and all recruits must assume a non de guerre. Just like in France, those who successfully serve say 5 years in the foreign legion are offered citizenship.

Could it start off as an end run around isolationism, and gradually evolve into a celebrated part of the US military? And, would the existence of a US foreign legion change the debate around immigration ("people from all over the world come here to fight under our flag, so we should welcome them").
 
The US has been enlisting foreign nationals in its military since the very beginning. It's hard to see something like this get any real traction unless for some reason the US has an overseas empire much earlier on and a military budget that's more in line with more established nations for the time.
 
Of course the US has enlisted foreigners into its military. But deploying US troops overseas puts US lives at risk, which is politically risky. So a foreign legion would circumvent this problem, since foreign legions' families can't vote, and carry less political risk. The US would still have to treat it's foreign legion well, if only to guarantee further recruits.
 
The major problem is that the French Foreign legion is seen as a way to get citizenship, and it was simply too easy to get american citizenship. We didn’t need it either, we had the marines as an expeditionary force.
 
A lot of effort went into explaining just how oppressive the british had been for employing hessians in repressing what they claimed were their own citizens. Maintaining a standing army had a political cost all its own, maintaining an overseas empire with their very own jackbooted hirelings is most likely not going to fly before the Spanish American war and even then the country isn't going to want to pay for it.

To answer the question about attitudes towards immigration though, the likelyhood is that this doesn't shift the needle that much. It's more likely that integrating them into american units as we have now would be more effective than ghettoizing them in some kind of expendable shock unit.
 
I cannot see the need for them as the US were enlisting non nationals until the end of vietnam war.
Not sure how US Foreign Legion would make wars easier as they still have to be paid for by congress.
 
For interventions you have the Marines, legally they could be used pretty freely unlike the Army. Once you have US "colonies" they are US soil and therefore employment of the Army (like in the Philippines after the Spanish surrender and transfer of sovereignty) is not an issue. Also, except during wartime (and the Cold War) the US military, unlike the French and many European militaries, is volunteer and not conscript - the advantage of having the Legion Étrangere was that it meant you could have it deployed all sorts of places without sending conscripts overseas.
 
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