Are we headed for war with Venezuela? Apart from other geopolitical considerations, any decision to use military force abroad must take into account its potential to create large new migration flows. Starting with our emergence as a world power with the Spanish-American War in 1898—and especially with our becoming a global hegemon after World War II—US involvement abroad has often led to significant unanticipated immigration.
This has been the case whether we engaged in a full-scale invasion and occupation, a more limited intervention, or even a proxy war. And this is inevitable, because immigration takes place through networks. No one wakes up in Montevideo and says, “Today, I will move to Milwaukee!”—people go where they have connections, and our military involvements abroad are one of the main ways such networks have been created.
Consider that there are some four and half million people of full or partial Filipino descent in the United States, thirty times as many as there are Indonesians here, even though the countries are next to each other and Indonesia has twice the population. This, obviously, is because we ruled the Philippines as a colony for fifty years and had a major military presence there for decades more, creating the networks that brought immigration. The situation is similar with our other major colonial acquisition from Spain, Puerto Rico.
After World War II, Congress passed the War Brides Act to allow American servicemen to bring home women they had married in Europe outside the immigration quotas that existed at the time. With the Korean War, Congress extended it to cover war brides from that country as well, and all told, it’s estimated some 100,000 Korean women moved here with their American husbands over several decades. When the whole immigration quota system was scrapped in 1965, the specific war-bride provisions became moot, but they had created an immigrant population that then was able to grow and diversify through family chain migration.
More traumatic and wrenching was the aftermath of the war in Vietnam. There were only a small number of war brides from that country, reflecting our relatively brief tenure there. But our defeat in Indochina, exemplified by the famous photo of the helicopter on the embassy roof, resulted in the eventual flight of several million people associated with our client regime or more generally fearing the consequences of communist victory. More than 1 million were resettled in the United States, creating an immigrant community that, as with Filipinos and Koreans, would not have existed but for our foreign adventures.
Whatever other consequences of those immigration flows, they didn’t create significant security or public safety threats. Not so with our next major exercise of force abroad, this time indirect—the civil wars in Central America.
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