Immigrants and military service

The nation’s all-volunteer military depends on a constant influx of recruits, yet the U.S. armed services have struggled to meet recruitment goals in recent years, raising serious questions about military readiness in an increasingly turbulent world.

New research from the University of Utah suggests residents who weren’t born in the United States maybe an important overlooked source of potential soldiers and sailors. According to the analysis of existing survey data, immigrants to the U.S. and Canada express a greater willingness to serve in the armed services of those countries than their native-born citizens.

“There’s growing evidence here that non-native born individuals are a pool of individuals who clearly are a group that we should focus on more in terms of recruiting into the military,” said Christopher Simon, a professor of public affairs and lead author on the study published last month in the journal Armed Forces & Society. “Immigrants’ commitment to the U.S. maybe a lot stronger than people realize, and their appreciation for the values and opportunities provided by the U.S. are things that they may feel they’re willing to fight for and protect and defend.”

These findings cut sharply across a harsh narrative perpetuated by some Republicans this election cycle, including presidential and vice-presidential candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance, characterizing immigrants as parasitic.  In fact, many immigrants seek to contribute to their host nations, and some actively pursue military service; the research offered by Simon and his team indicate that more could and should be done to channel immigrant willingness to protect the U.S. through military service.

That anti-immigrant attitude may actually undermine national security, according to co-author Nicholas Lovrich, a professor emeritus of political science at Washington State University and currently an affiliate researcher at Utah.

“We used to get a broader swath of Americans from all kinds of areas, geographic and otherwise, willing to serve, and that’s declining virtually everywhere. The one place that is the strongest support is in immigrants coming to this country,” Lovrich said. “We saw that the tie between military preparedness and secure borders and fixing the immigration system, which is broken, is a very close one. Our nation’s family formation rate is down, our average number of kids per family is down. We know that the fewer kids you have, the less the parents want them to be in military service. All these indicators are going in the wrong direction except for immigrants. So it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to be closing our borders for anybody from the outside at this time.”

Co-authors include Col. Kenneth Verboncoeur, Utah-based retired U.S. Army officer with much experience with military recruitment, and Michael Moltz, professor of public administration at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

The United States employs 1.3 million active-duty service members, or 2 million when reserves are counted. That’s around 1% of the adult population, and that portion shrinks every year as recruitments sags behind recruitment targets.

For the new study, the researchers examined immigrants to both United States and its northern neighbor Canada. Both countries are multi-ethnic democratic societies that have relied on all-volunteer forces for decades, and they experience strong in-migration, while their populations are hewing older. Immigrants make up 14% of the U.S. population and 23% of Canada’s. About 8,000 non-citizens join the U.S. military each year, out of less than 150,000 total in recent years.

Both countries offer inducements to serve in their militaries, and for immigrants that includes an expedited pathway to citizenship. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services naturalized 109,321 service members between 2001 and 2015. In 2012, 24,000 immigrants were on active duty, according to the National Immigration Forum.

The new research, which was an independent study not funded by any source, tapped an existing database known as the World Values Survey maintained since 1981 by a global network of social scientists who study changing values and their impact on social and political life. The Utah team used the WVS’s Wave 7, a 290-question data set covering 87,000 respondents from 60 nations fielded between 2017 and 2022. Their study focused on the 4,018 respondents from Canada and 2,596 from the United States. The data included the respondents’ immigration status and country of birth, but not the year of immigration.

“We use social identity theory and deep psychology theory to look at and to explore the idea of how immigrants might be different in their response to a question about willingness to serve versus native born,” Simon said. “And that actually produced a pretty strong study by enlarging our theoretical framework beyond the existing military sociology literature.”

Immigrants to both countries were significantly more likely to express a willingness to fight in uniform than native-born citizens. Those in the U.S. coming from the following countries showed the most willingness: China, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Germany, Mexico, Philippines, Taiwan and the U.K.

Willingness to serve in war appeared to be tethered to the nature of the conflict and tended to be motivated by a desire for civic connectedness, as opposed to militarism or nationalism.

“The people aren’t blindly saying they’re willing to serve,” Simon said. “In some cases, for instance, people are saying they’re less willing to fight if it’s a war between countries, but more willing to fight if it’s an issue around terrorism.”

Because the study is based on WVS surveys the researchers did not design or control, their new findings cannot be considered definitive without additional enquiry.

“We were stuck with what questions they asked,” Lovrich said. “But the panels tell us something important and indicate important next steps for study. We have to talk to real people. We have to do a lot of focus groups and qualitative research to back up what we have found in the survey data to see if what we’re seeing in the most recent WVS surveys is panning out with real people.”

Accordingly, Simon and Lovrich hope to leverage their findings to land grant funding to support more in-depth inquiries into immigrants’ willingness to serve.