Posting #30 The Story of Immigrants in the US Military

The story: Despite the dominant story that the United States is a nation of immigrants and that this is a good thing, the most recent version in the last decade is that immigrants to the United States are a scourge.  This recent story tells American citizens that immigrants bring nothing of worth to the United States and, like inhuman vampires, only suck the country dry. They are criminals and rapists, the story says, they are dirty and demented, they are terrorists and invaders, and they are poisoning “our” blood.

My take on the story: Aside from the falsity of this story and its basis in nativism and eugenics, or scientific racism, it conveniently ignores the many foreign born/foreign nationals/immigrants who contribute mightily to this country.  They pay taxes, they are inventors and entrepreneurs, they have revitalized failing communities, and they have defended this country, even without being citizens.   Immigrants have served in the military since the Revolutionary War and continue to serve.  In the last century, more than 760K immigrants have served, in the last twenty years alone, more than 156K, and approximately 45K immigrants are serving on active-duty now.

This story told for the last decade that dehumanizes immigrants, obviously discounts their contributions, and ignores how THE VAST MAJORITY OF AMERICANS are not indigenous people is not a new one, though.  Despite the alleged foundation of the country on immigration, the US has a long, long history of fearfully vilifying and discriminating among newcomers to the country.

What follows is a long, what might seem meandering, path through the history of immigration in the US, since the status of immigrants in the military can’t be fathomed without understanding the larger context of the issue.  I will, however, try to keep you mindful of immigrants in the military as I synthesize this history, and I’ll conclude on the issue of immigrants in the military. So hang with me, please!

According to the Cato Institute, the United States immigration policy has been inconsistent and often blatantly xenophobic since its founding. Here’s an abbreviated timeline of the country’s early days of immigration and regulation:

·      During the Colonial period, when British law still governed the colonies and limited immigration, it was still encouraged locally, including forced-migrants like convicts and slaves. One-half to two-thirds of the immigrants who came from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany to the American colonies arrived as indentured servants.

·      By the beginning of the Revolutionary period, the colonial population was 2.2 million, including 346K immigrants and about 450K enslaved people. Immigrants from Poland, Germany, and France aided the revolution.  After the Revolution, the Constitution said nothing about immigration per se, so states and not the federal government continued to regulate immigration, usually with very differing standards.  Meanwhile, slaves were being stolen from Africa and often brought to the United States at the rate of 85K per year. 

·      In the Early days of the Republic, however, the federal government began its control of immigration by regulating who could become a naturalized citizen.  Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1790, extending citizenship to “free white persons of good character” who had resided in the United States for two years and took an oath of allegiance. But the law prohibited indentured servants, non-whites, and slaves from becoming citizens. Fear of a foreign-born population with voting rights led to the Naturalization Act of 1795, which increased to five years the residency requirement, included a mandate that immigrant residents declare an intention to naturalize three years before doing so, and, with clear religious overtones, changed “good character” to “good moral character.”  This language is still used in immigration law.

·      More fear about “the enemy within” led Congress in 1798 to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts.  These four laws, which “tightened restrictions on foreign-born Americans and limited speech critical of the government” and “subjected aliens [immigrants] to the threat of national surveillance and arbitrary arrest and granted a new power to the president to deport noncitizens via decree,” increased the residency period for naturalization to 14 years—the longest period in American history—and required that prospective citizens declare their intent to naturalize five years before doing so. Four years later, in 1802, Congress passed the Naturalization Law of 1802 that reverted the residency requirements for naturalization to five years. 

(In 2024, convicted felon and President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, the only one of the four still in effect, “to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil.”  It has been invoked only three times before, during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II.)

·      At the turn of the 19^th century, during the first large wave of immigration, more than 250,000 Northern and Western Europeans immigrated to the US.  Fear that Europe would ship its poor to the United States caused the US Congress in 1819 to limit the number of passengers ships could carry through the 1819 Steerage Act.  Those limits meant an increase in the price of travel, thereby reducing the number of impoverished immigrants who could afford passage.

·      Still, the next significant wave of immigrants began to arrive around 1830, when the U.S. population was nearly 12.9 million.  Most immigrants found ways then to avoid indentured servitude at the same time that more than 80K people a year were being compelled to leave Africa in slave ships. Well over a million more were forcibly removed to the United States in the next twenty years, even though England abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in its colonies in 1834.  Meanwhile, turmoil in Europe, such as the 1845 Irish Potato Famine and the European political revolutions of 1848, and the “land boom of the 1840s, when removal of Indigenous peoples had opened up rich new lands for settlement,” pushed immigrants to the United States. Their numbers escalated from 599,125 during the 1830s to 1,713,251 during the 1840s. By 1855, 51% of the New York City population was foreign-born, and in California (post Gold-Rush), more than 63% of the state’s population was foreign-born.

But fear of the arrival of Irish Catholics and others from Germany and France with cultures differing from the dominant white Anglican English pre-Civil War spawned nativism.  Aside from these immigrants’ cultural differences, like Catholicism and opposition to slavery, nativists feared wage competition, Irish immigrants’ heavy reliance on charity and their supposed first allegiance to the Pope, and the religious dichotomy between the new Catholic immigrants and the native-born Americans, who were primarily Protestant.  Members of the nativist American Party, aka the “Know-Nothings,” wanted foreign-born beggars and criminals to be deported, a 21-year naturalization residency period for immigrants to become citizens, mandatory Bible reading in public schools to emphasize Protestantism, and the elimination and prohibition of all Catholics from public office.  Conspiracies about Catholics abounded: Catholic churches were burned, priests were accused of raping nuns and then strangling the ensuing progeny, ethnic differences were emphasized over class solidarity, and “No Irish Need Apply” appeared regularly in job advertisements.  Though it is not fully historically accurate, Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film, The Gangs of New York is not far from depicting this nativist group and their activities.

Chinese immigrants began coming to the US in the 1850s, first to work in the gold mines and second, to build railroads in the American west.  As they grew successful in the United States, anti-Chinese sentiment, nativism, and fear found fertile ground among other workers in the American economy.

During the Civil War, President Lincoln and other Republicans dismissed the nativists, needing as the country did workers for the newly-born war industries, to populate the Union forces, and to populate the west. Over 150K Irish immigrants and more than 216K German immigrants constituted 25% of the entire Union Army.  Five percent of the Confederate Army were foreign-born, mostly of Irish and English origins.  Meanwhile, Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862, which offered land grants to both US citizens and immigrants who were eligible for naturalization and who were willing to settle and develop land for five years. It also passed the Act to Encourage Immigration of 1864, which allowed private employers to recruit foreign workers, pay their transportation costs, and contract their labor. Because this resembled indentured servitude, Congress repealed the law in 1868.

After the Civil War, in 1868, birthright citizenship was guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.  In the same year, a treaty with China was negotiated to permit Chinese citizens to emigrate freely from China to the US. The low-cost labor of Chinese immigrants flowed into the western United States and caused racist and nativist fear.  Consequently, the Naturalization Act of 1870 granted naturalization rights only to “aliens being free white persons, and to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” 

Such an ironic way to get around the fact that most of African descent or nativity were brought against their will to the United States!

Intensely growing anti-Chinese sentiment led Congress further to pass the Page Act of 1875, which restricted the immigration of Chinese contract laborers, convicts, and many Chinese women, most of whom were the wives of male workers, on the spurious grounds that they were prostitutes. This all culminated in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.  This was the first law in American history to broadly restrict immigration of a specific group, even when another 10.4M immigrants were arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Clearly, with only restrictions on Chinese immigrants, the nation’ s policy on naturalization was central but broadly inconsistent:

Methods adopted by late nineteenth-century courts to determine qualifications for citizenship varied widely. Just as courts in some localities interpreted the "good moral character" requirement differently, judges in different jurisdictions had differing ideas of what constituted "whiteness." Many thousands of elected county judges across the nation simply relied on their "common understanding" of race, an understanding presumably shared by the local community.

Consequently, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1891, a law that not only vested immigration authority primarily in the federal government, it also defined as excludable or deportable “felons, polygamists, ‘all idiots, insane persons, paupers or persons likely to become a public charge’ as well as those suffering from infectious diseases.”  This marks the embeddedness of eugenics in regard to immigration, leading to calls for “mandatory literacy tests, as well as various other eugenics-inspired racial and ethnic exclusions of Jews, Asians, and Africans.”

One manifestation of this late-nineteenth century form of nativist thinking was the “Americanization Movement”—or pressure for immigrants especially from Southern and Eastern Europe and more likely to be Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish—to assimilate into American culture to suppress what was feared to be growing socialism and union power, and promote, with antisemitic Henry Ford’s support, productivity.  “The rural-settling protestant Swedes and Germans who were out of sight were not a major cause for concern but the urban-settling Catholic Italians, Orthodox Russians, and Jewish Poles were.”  

Because of the inconsistency that permitted nativism and fraud, like the naturalization of large groups before elections to produce more voters, in 1906, Congress passed the Basic Naturalization Act of 1906 to try to standardize immigration and naturalization processes. This law has provided the basis for most immigration and naturalization law for the duration of the 20^th century.   In 1917—the year the United States entered World War I—Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917.  At the same time that men who were immigrants and not yet citizens were being drafted into the military, potential immigrants were also being broadly excluded from entry. Not only did the 1917 law exclude immigrants from the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” it also limited immigrants from African countries, required immigrants to pay a higher tax at entry, gave to federal immigration officials the discretion to decide who to exclude, and required immigrants over the age of 16 to be literate in any language.  Still, during World War I around 500K immigrants served in the US military, approximately 18% of all soldiers.

By 1921, the impetus to establish immigration quotas, impose eugenical modes of thinking, and preserve US homogeneity—i.e. exclude certain non-White-Anglo-Saxon-Persons by limiting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe—led to the Emergency Quota Act of 1921.  This

temporary measure limited immigration “scientifically” by imposing quotas based on immigrants’ country of birth. …Before 1921, immigration laws pertained primarily to which immigrants to exclude, while any immigrant not specifically excluded could migrate. However, beginning in 1921 and continuing until today, the opposite has been the status quo: federal agencies decide which immigrants to admit and deny entry to those not explicitly approved. (emphasis added)

This law was further cemented with the 1924 Immigration Act, discriminating among immigrants’ place of origin by increasing the number of visas available to immigrants from Northern and Western Europe (82%) and decreasing the number of visas available to those from Southern and Eastern Europe (14%).  It also severely limited any immigration (to 4%) by people from the Eastern hemisphere, including previously permitted Japanese. Wives and children of immigrants from the Western hemisphere were not included in those quotas, so that exponentially many more could enter as immigrants.

This era—World War I and immediately after—is when Mexicans began to immigrate to provide the cheap labor previously provided by the newly-excluded Southern and Eastern Europeans.  When immigration restrictionists argued that it made no sense to include Mexican “mixed breeds,” the Supreme Court conferred the racial status of “white” on the Mexican migrants.  Still, approximately 175K undocumented immigrants entered the United States annually, while during 1917 and 1922, Mexican migrants were permitted to come to labor temporarily, as guest workers, in the United States.  This situation was reversed during the Depression, when it was thought that deporting over a million Mexicans and Mexican Americans would provide jobs to native-born Americans.  (It did not.)  By the end of the 1930s, however, annual immigration dropped from 554K to 70K.

Two months after the United States entered World War II in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, and established concentration camps for “enemies of the State”: 122K Japanese and Japanese Americans, 1881 Italians and Italian-Americans, and 11K Germans and German Americans in the United States. Just as Mexican Americans—citizens—were deported a few years earlier, citizenship did not protect the Japanese, Italian, and German Americans from discrimination. Ironically, 33K previously incarcerated Japanese American young men were drafted and served in the US military during the war. 

Furthermore, the quotas imposed by the 1924 Immigration Act did not make allowances for refugees, and even though the quota for Germans was underfilled during the 1930s, the European Jews being refugees meant they would be dependent on the federal government for support—and so were barred from immigrating.  Had the law not been in place, “there is little doubt that virtually all German Jews—and many others from Eastern Europe—could have escaped to the United States before the outbreak of the war.”

The United States learned from World War II in the post-war period that it needed to provide legal refuge from hostilities, and so passed two laws for the first time accommodating refugees above and beyond quotas: the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, which aimed to address the nearly 7M people displaced by war in Europe, and the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, which authorized nearly 200,000 special non-quota immigrant visas for refugees and escapees from communist countries.  As a consequence of both these laws, the US admitted more than a half million refugees between 1945 and 1962, including 40K refugees from Hungary, 2K from the Azores, 5K Armenians from Lebanon, 60K from Cuba, and 15K from China.  At the same time, however, from 1953-1954 the federal government, using the Border Patrol because, under the Posse Comitatus Act, the US military cannot be used to enforce domestic laws, deported more than 1.3M Mexicans and Mexican Americans from the United States to Mexico in a campaign with a blatantly racist name: Operation Wetback.

The US law currently governing immigration was passed in 1965: the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.  It repealed the 1924 eugenics-based national-origins quotas and was replaced “with a preference system based on immigrants’ family relationships with U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents and, to a lesser degree, their skills,” leading to what we know as “chain migration.”  The changes to the US demographic profile since 1965 have been profound: green-card holders have risen from 297K per year to 1M per year, the foreign-born population has risen from 9.6M in 1965 to 45M in 2015 to 47.8M in 2023, or from 5% of the US population to 14% to 14.3%, and without a guest-worker program in place, approximately 11M unauthorized immigrants from all over the world have found their way into the country.

So what?

It is astonishing that, despite a long history of flagrant US discrimination against and fear of anyone not from Western Europe, immigrants have served in the US military for its entire history. Reportedly, they are better soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines than native-born servicepeople, they stay in the military longer, and though they only constitute about 2% of today’s US military, they account for 20% of all Congressional Medals of Honor awarded for valor.  As of 2022, 731K immigrant veterans constitute just over 4.5% of the country’s 16.2 million veterans.  Mexican and Filipino immigrants comprise the largest groups of foreign-born veterans, who tend to be married and not divorced, have a higher educational attainment than US-born veterans, have higher incomes than native-born veterans, and are much less likely to be in poverty than native-born.  Finally, 84% of immigrant veterans have become naturalized citizens.

For 760K immigrants, serving in the US military has provided a pathway to citizenship.  The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 permits foreign-born people who serve on active duty or in any Reserve Component to naturalize and secure U.S. citizenship after completing one year of honorable service during peacetime, or immediately if serving during designated “periods of hostility,” such as the War on Terrorism (which began on September 11, 2001 and continues today).

But despite immigrants serving throughout the nation’s history and at times when they were clearly discriminated against, the numbers of immigrants serving in the US military is likely to change soon, with the 2024 election of Donald Trump to the presidency.  Not only does he propagate this “America First” story that immigrants are vile—even though his mother and his first and third wife are immigrants—Trump’s 2017-2021 administration led to a 70% decrease in the naturalizations of service members, a 25-year low. He did this by lengthening the “honorable service” wait times, wait times a judge ruled in 2020 were illegal.  Trump’s administration also denied military naturalization application rates at twice the rate of civilian applications, he closed field offices abroad that facilitated naturalization applications of servicepeople abroad, and though President Obama had put the program on hold in 2016, Trump put an end to the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) program.  This program was a DOD-established pilot program to “authorize the enlistment of (1) health care professionals who could fill shortages of personnel in particular medical specialties, and (2) individuals with particular language skills or cultural backgrounds.”  While other immigrant servicepeople must at least have a green card or be naturalized already, enlistees in this program could be “asylees, refugees, holders of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and certain nonimmigrants (individuals authorized to enter the United States on a temporary basis for a specified purpose, such as foreign students).”  DACA recipients also became eligible in 2014.

With the death of the program in 2017, however, not only is the military denied the expertise of these health care and language-skill experts, the applicants who were often invited to apply for the program have been left in immigration limbo.  They were promised a pathway to citizenship but instead face losing their immigration status and being deported.

Now, the incoming Trump administration threatens to “denaturalize” and deport foreign-born people who have become naturalized citizens. I suspect military veterans will not be immune to this hateful policy.

How likely is it, then, that immigrants will take a chance on the US military? If the vaunted citizenship doesn’t ensure they won’t be deported or yanked around or otherwise threatened by the person who should be primarily interested in their welfare—the Commander-in-Chief?

When the armed forces cannot recruit enough native-born to fill the ranks, can they afford to lose immigrants?

The US has been perfectly willing to exploit immigrants to serve in the military—but apparently not reliably compensate them with stable citizenship.   This is disturbingly similar to how we’re willing to send our young, native-born people to combat and then not provide the medical, emotional, and social care they inevitably need as veterans of war.  We’ll say “Thank you for your service” to immigrant servicepeople…and then deport them, using other immigrant servicepeople.