Abstract
Noncitizens in the United States have been receiving citizenship for military service in every war and almost every significant military operation since before the country was founded. Currently, many noncitizens fight for the United States and in return receive faster access to naturalization and citizenship. Nevertheless, politicians and pundits across the political spectrum tend to avoid mentioning this policy altogether. To explore the possible mass bases of this elite silence, we provide the first look at whether contemporary Americans support jus meritum (citizenship based on service) or not. Using experiments, we also examine whether opinions differ if the immigrants initially entered the country with documents or not, and whether the type of service (military or other) affects public support for these long-running policies.
- © 2020 Russell Sage Foundation. Wong, Cara, and Jonathan Bonaguro. 2020. “The Value of Citizenship and Service to the Nation.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 6(3): 96–116. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2020.6.3.05. This research received funding from the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research and the Research Board of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. This article was written when the first author was a Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 2018–2019. Thanks also to Jake Bowers, Sam Luks, and Marissa Shih for their help, advice, and comments. Direct correspondence to: Cara Wong at carawong{at}illinois.edu, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 420 David Kinley Hall, 1407 W. Gregory Dr., Urbana, IL 61801, United States.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.