Europe faces parallel challenges that policymakers have yet to connect: a pressing military recruitment shortage and an ongoing migration challenge. While politicians wring their hands over both issues separately, an opportunity has been hiding in plain sight. European countries should create a pathway to citizenship for immigrants willing to serve in their armed forces.
Europe’s manpower crisis is real. According to recent defense reporting, in 2025 Germany’s Bundeswehr saw recruiting continue to fall behind targets, despite recruitment campaigns. The United Kingdom continues to fall short of its annual recruitment goal, with more service members leaving than joining. France, Italy, and the Netherlands all face similar shortfalls, with more than 20 percent of professional soldier positions remaining unfilled across many European militaries.
Closing manpower gaps may prove harder than writing bigger checks. The continent’s demographic crisis compounds the problem: Births in the European Union fell below 4 million in 2022 for the first time since 1960, shrinking the pool of potential recruits as geopolitical threats—chief among them, Russian aggression—demand larger, more capable forces.
Ukraine’s grinding war of attrition has laid bare an uncomfortable truth: Emerging capabilities in the form of high-tech weaponry cannot substitute for boots on the ground. Soldiers, sailors, marines, coast guardsmen, and airmen are the backbone of national defense. Yet the European Commission estimates a 43 million reduction in the bloc’s working-age population by 2070.
Neither the EU nor NATO traditionally coordinates military recruitment—defense personnel policy remains strictly a national competence. The EU coordinates defense procurement, joint operations, and capability development through the European Defence Agency (EDA) yet has no mechanism to address the single-most critical constraint: manpower. NATO’s approach had been similarly hands off, until November 2024, when the alliance convened allied personnel policy directors to discuss a larger NATO role in recruiting and retaining military personnel. The fact that NATO is only now elevating workforce issues as part of the alliance’s political agenda alongside funding and procurement reveals how long both institutions have ignored their most fundamental constraint. While the EDA scrambles to harmonize ammunition purchases and tank specifications, neither body has any mechanism to help member states fill the empty seats in those tanks. National recruitment policies remain sovereign prerogatives, leaving each country to independently solve around the same demographic crisis.
Meanwhile, Europe continues to grapple with significant migration flows from Africa, the Middle East, and other regions. These arrivals, often young, male, and seeking better opportunities, represent exactly the demographic cohort European militaries desperately need. Many migrants arrive with valuable skills: language abilities, cultural knowledge of strategic regions, technical expertise, and, most importantly, motivation to prove themselves and build new lives.
The connection between European security threats and migration is even more direct than demographics suggest. Beyond the refugee crisis spurred by Russia’s war against Ukraine, Russian destabilization in Africa’s Sahel region—through Wagner Group and now Africa Corps operations in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger—has displaced 5.5 million people and sent asylum applications to Europe soaring. Moscow’s mercenaries fuel instability that drives migration flows to Europe, while Europe refuses to integrate these same migrants into the forces needed to counter Russian aggression. Russia’s support for the former Assad regime in Syria catalyzed the global refugee crisis of the 2010s, with Syrians fleeing Russian-supported bombardment making up the majority of refugees arriving on Europe’s shores. Russia further weaponizes migration by fueling migrant-related disinformation and promoting right-wing, EU-skeptic parties from Warsaw to Washington. The imagery of Syrian migrants arriving to Britain—catalyzed and then leveraged by Moscow—fueled the Brexit movement.
The current approach treats migration purely as a humanitarian or security challenge, missing its strategic potential entirely. European nations spend enormous resources processing asylum claims, managing refugee camps, and debating integration policies while simultaneously struggling to fill recruitment quotas with increasingly expensive incentive packages that fail to attract sufficient native-born citizens. The political center regarding migration has collapsed in the face of far-right xenophobic approaches to the migration file, such that few policy initiatives other than hardening land and maritime borders and cutting deals to send migrants away see the light of day.
Immigrant military recruitment is one of history’s most successful integration strategies. The United States has offered military service as a pathway to citizenship since its Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation allowing noncitizens to naturalize after just one year of honorable service. The tradition deepened through two world wars and the Cold War and continues today.
Since the end of World War I, more than 800,000 individuals have naturalized through U.S. military service. The practice accelerated amid the global war on terrorism, with roughly 131,000 service members naturalizing between 2001 and 2023. These immigrant soldiers have contributed disproportionately to U.S. military heritage—22 percent of Medal of Honor recipients have been immigrants, from the Civil War Irish brigades to modern-day recipients such as French American Florent Ahmed Groberg and Mexican American Alfred Velazquez Rascon. The U.S. military has seen leaders of immigrant background rise to the highest ranks, including John Shalikashvili, a Poland-born Georgian American who rose to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Gen. John Abizaid, the grandson of Lebanese immigrants who served as the head of U.S. Central Command.
Service members of immigrant backgrounds bring critical capabilities: language skills for operations in complex regions, cultural understanding that prevents strategic missteps, technical expertise in shortage areas such as medicine and engineering, and demonstrated motivation that often exceeds native recruits. Immigrant contributions to U.S. military technology are substantial, from Hyman Rickover revolutionizing nuclear submarine propulsion to Igor Sikorsky advancing helicopter technology.
The model works because it aligns incentives perfectly. Currently, around 5,000 legal permanent residents enlist in U.S. forces annually, with expedited naturalization available after as little as one day of honorable service during designated periods of hostility. The promise of citizenship provides powerful motivation, and military service demonstrates commitment to the nation in the most tangible way possible. The United States demonstrates that national identity is forged through shared sacrifice, not shared ancestry.
Roughly 4.5 percent of veterans in the United States are foreign-born. About 1 percent of the U.S. population today serves in the military, and 5 percent of that force is foreign-born. While at least 40,000 immigrants currently serve in the U.S. armed forces, Europe’s 1.47 million-strong military (including the U.K.) remains almost exclusively native-born despite those countries hosting nearly 50 million foreign-born residents.
Some European nations already recognize this opportunity, though on a limited scale. Belgium and Ireland accept EU citizens into their armed forces. Spain recruits from countries that were once part of the Spanish Empire. The French Foreign Legion has attracted foreign volunteers for nearly two centuries, proving that noncitizens can serve with distinction and loyalty. The U.K. draws recruits from Commonwealth nations but maintains an annual cap of 1,350 while having received 16,990 Commonwealth applicants to the Army in 2023. More recently, Germany has considered opening recruitment to EU citizens, while discussions continue about whether Poland’s training of Ukrainian refugees could establish precedent for foreign fighting forces. But these moves are still baby steps, avoiding the clear alternative.
To solve its manpower problem, Europe should implement a bold but carefully structured program. First, create a “service to citizenship” pathway by offering asylum-seekers and qualified migrants expedited permanent residency and eventual citizenship in exchange for military service. This could be modeled on U.S. provisions that have proved effective over generations.
Second, establish rigorous vetting: Security screening must be thorough, leveraging NATO intelligence-sharing and biometric databases. Third, start with nonsensitive roles: Initial assignments could focus on logistics, medical services, engineering, and support functions rather than front-line combat or intelligence positions. Progression to sensitive roles would require citizenship and security clearances.
Fourth, require meaningful integration. Mandate language proficiency, cultural training, and demonstrated commitment to democratic values. Military service itself becomes an integration mechanism, instilling shared identity and values. Germany’s experience with Syrian refugees—with a successful employment rate of more than 60 percent, earned through both language and vocational certification—is a success story in this case.
Lastly, leaders should address political concerns proactively: While strengthening pathways for legal migration is a reaffirmation of European values, this campaign can be framed as enhancing European security rather than enabling mass migration. Recruiters should emphasize that military service represents the highest form of integration—willingness to defend one’s adopted homeland.
Skeptics will raise legitimate concerns: What about loyalty? Security risks? Political backlash? Cultural integration?
These objections have answers. Loyalty is demonstrated through service, not bloodline. The U.S. experience demonstrates this. Enhanced security vetting can mitigate risks while accepting that no system is perfect. Domestic recruits also pose security concerns, as espionage and domestic extremism cases demonstrate. Political opposition exists, but so does Vladimir Putin, who not only violates European sovereignty on a regular basis but has weaponized Europe’s migration challenges in the information environment.
As for cultural concerns, military service is perhaps the most effective integration tool available. Shared hardship, common purpose, and institutional values forge bonds that transcend ethnic or national origin. European militaries would become more capable precisely because they reflect the richness of the societies they defend and the knowledge integrated about different geographies and human terrains. And where certain countries struggle on a strategic culture front with World War II- and Cold War-era legacies to inspire youth recruitment, newcomers from countries destabilized by Russian bombardment (Syria), by Russian mercenaries and violent Islamist extremism (sub-Saharan Africa), or by Iranian proxy groups (Yemen and Iraq) understand the stakes for democratic nations.
The demographic mathematics are unforgiving. European birthrates will remain a policy challenge. The security environment will not become less threatening. Under U.S. President Donald Trump, European defense may be moving to being more Europe-led, and that might not reverse under a more Atlanticist U.S. presidency. Even Nordic exemplars such as Finland and Sweden—with conscription systems and stalwart defense spending—face the same long-term strategic challenges.
Meanwhile, thousands of young people arrive in Europe each month seeking freedom and opportunity and are willing to work hard for a better life. Many would gladly serve in uniform if offered a genuine path to citizenship and belonging.
