Immigrants show greater willingness to join the military, study shows

Immigrants to the U.S. are more willing to “fight for the country” than the native-born, according to a multinational study that may have resonance amid military recruitment struggles and an election charged with rhetoric and misinformation.

Some 60 percent of U.S. respondents expressed a willingness to fight for their country, and immigrants were nearly 30 percent more likely to do so than native-born citizens, according to the study, whose results were described in the September issue of Armed Forces & Society.

The researchers compared multiple surveys across several years including 2024, looking at Americans' and Canadians' responses to questions about background, self-identity, religious beliefs, feelings of national pride, and more. The study was conducted by Christopher Simon of the University of Utah, Nicholas P. Lovrich of Washington State University, Kenneth G. Verboncoeur, of the U.S. Army, and Michael C. Moltz of Shippensburg University.

The authors write that demographics will lead many Western militaries to recruit more immigrants.

“Recruitment shortfalls plaguing prominent Western militaries employing the all-volunteer force model raise concerns about the maintenance of force size and readiness. Faced with aging populations, many developed nations will increasingly rely on immigrant youth to address recruitment shortfalls,” the authors write. 

(So far, in the United States, most services report being on track or above their 2024 goals to date but fell beneath their 2023 goals.)

The survey also indicates that immigrants are more civic-minded and oriented toward public service than the native-born populations of the countries in which they reside. That belies many claims by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has made derogation of immigrants a chief theme of his campaign.  

Immigrants’ propensity to “fight” appears to be less about their affinity for the military than for the society they have joined, the authors write. 

“The evidence presented here would indicate that immigrant willingness to fight is associated primarily with building civic connectedness in the host nation and is not a function of militarism or nationalism,” they wrote.

While military service has long been a way for documented immigrants to speed up the naturalization process, much of the current national immigration debate has focused on undocumented immigrants, who are generally not allowed to join the military. Their wait for legal status averages about two years, and grew longer during the Trump administration.

On the campaign trail, Trump has vowed mass deportations of even legal immigrants at gunpoint by the National Guard. It's hard to imagine such a policy gaining support among the immigrant community interested in military service.