The United States is home to about 51 million immigrants, more than any country worldwide. Because of this, metaphors like the “melting pot” and the “salad bowl” have often been used to describe America’s multiculturalism. This imagery captures an ongoing tension in American life: how does diversity translate into belonging?
For decades, scholars have argued that institutions play a key role in bridging the gap between newcomers and the national core. Military service, in particular, has long been viewed as a potential bridge.
DOES SERVING IN THE MILITARY INTEGRATE IMMIGRANTS?
The logic here is that serving in the military can strengthen national identity and foster tolerance between different groups. But does military service actually cause immigrants to become more integrated into society? New research by Nan Zhang and Melissa M. Lee suggests that the answer may be no.
A key identification challenge arises from the problem of self-selection. People don’t enter the military at random. Those who serve might already feel a strong sense of belonging and national pride. So, the story may be about who chooses to serve, not the effects of service itself, a challenge social scientists call selection bias.
A NATURAL EXPERIMENT FROM THE VIETNAM WAR
To solve this problem, Zhang and Lee turn to a rare historical moment when entry to the military was shaped by chance rather than choice: the Vietnam War draft lotteries. Because draft numbers were assigned randomly to both citizens and resident noncitizens, the lottery system created conditions similar to a natural experiment. Zhang and Lee therefore link Vietnam draft lottery data to the 2000 US Census to gather information about immigrants’ long-term integration. They focus on four main measures of integration: naturalization, residential integration, English language adoption, and marriage and partner choice.
Without accounting for selection, veterans do appear to be more integrated. But once the researchers use draft risk to separate chance from choice, those differences disappear. Immigrant veterans were not more likely to naturalize, live in more integrated neighborhoods, adopt English, or marry into the native-born population as a result of their service.
To be clear, the authors do not argue that military service can never foster integration. In fact, they find evidence that service increased immigrants’ chances of completing college, which they attribute to the GI Bill—a federal program that helps veterans cover the costs of college tuition and job training programs. But upon zooming out, their findings show that military service did not fundamentally reshape immigrants’ long-term incorporation into mainstream society. This is significant because it challenges the long-standing assumption in political science that military service naturally produces integration.
TOMORROW’S ERA
For decades, military service has been imagined as a powerful engine of nation-building. Zhang and Lee complicate this narrative by showing us that even an institution as mighty as the military does not automatically produce integration for newcomers. Service alone cannot fully answer the question of belonging for immigrants.
The US spends hundreds of billions of dollars on defense each year, with proposals aiming to push the figure beyond $1 trillion. At the same time, immigration remains one of the most contested issues in American politics, making questions about who belongs and who counts as part of the national community ever more critical. By leveraging a rare natural experiment, Zhang and Lee push the field to rethink how we connect military service and immigrant incorporation. In a moment defined by intense immigration enforcement and ongoing military conflicts, their work suggests that belonging is not just shaped by participation in institutions alone, but rather by the broader political environment that defines tomorrow’s era—one that determines who is welcomed, who is marginalized and whose place in the nation remains conditional. ■
