Immigration hawks want you to believe that men are a threat by default. Figures like former President Donald Trump and current House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) argue that immigration is truly an “invasion” because many migrants lining up at the border are “males of military age” from “opposing nations.” The implication is not that these people work for a specific army or militant organization, but that any young man from the wrong country is guilty until proven innocent.
Both conservatives and liberals may be surprised to learn that this idea was incorporated into U.S. policy by former President Barack Obama. During the drone campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Obama administration counted any “military age” men in certain areas as enemy combatants, even if the US government did not know who those men were. The policy allowed Obama to downplay the number of civilians killed by US drone strikes.
Of course, the category of men of military age or combat age is much older than the drone program. But as political scientist Micah Zenko pointed out A item for the Council on Foreign Relations, the term “military-age male re-entered the lexicon of American warfare” during the Obama-era debate over the drone program.
“Mr. Obama adopted a controversial method of counting civilian casualties that did little to frame him,” The New York Times revealed in 2012. “Indeed, according to several administration officials, it counts as combatants all military-aged males in an attack zone, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving their innocence.”
Even more dystopianally, the CIA had inherited from the Bush administration a policy known as “signature strike.” Drone pilots were allowed firing on gunmen “associated with suspicious activity even though their identity was unknown,” according to THE New Yorker.
Obama expanded the definition of “suspicious activity” to include almost any man being in the wrong place at the wrong time, supervising 10 times as many drone attacks as Bush had. Obama administration officials said THE Times that “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a very high-level Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.”
The term “military-aged males” has moved from US military and intelligence circles into American politics even during the Obama era. In late 2015, at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, Republican politicians, including Trump he began to complain that the Obama administration was importing an “army” of Syrian men of fighting age. Radio host Rush Limbaugh, who had previously covered THE Times revelations about Obama’s targeting of “military-age males,” was an important figure pushing this narrative.
According to the survey, only a quarter of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States at the time were adult men, and only 2 percent were single adult men. US State Department documents.
One of the first uses of the specific term “military-aged males” in the immigration debate came from Allen West, a former Army colonel who had it derailed his career torturing an Iraqi detainee. “We should not allow any male of military age to take part in this refugee crisis,” West She said in a Fox and friends interview on November 16, 2015. “I believe that anyone from 16 to 40, single males, should not be allowed in. This is a Trojan horse.”
The Obama administration had little reason to oppose West’s logic. A few months after that interview, the Obama administration has completed its internal review of signature strikes. The government has decided to continue the practice of killing unknown and suspicious men, with the caveat that people will now be considered “non-combatants until proven otherwise” rather than the other way around.
During the Trump and Biden eras, politicians, from Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) and former Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-California) to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones– continued to rail against “military-age males” who immigrated to Western countries.
This topic of discussion really picked up again in mid-2023, according to the News on the Web Corpus, a database of English-language online media in several countries. The data also captured a spike in stories about young Russians fleeing the draft in mid-2022.
The same is true for television, according to one analysis commissioned Of THE Washington Post, which showed a massive increase in the use of the phrase “military age” in the context of immigration debates starting in mid-2023. Nearly all of these mentions came on Fox News, particularly on Sean Hannity’s show. And the rise in use of the term was entirely political, because it came as a decreasing percentage From the people stopped at the border were single adults while a growing percentage came from families with children.
Proponents of immigration restriction, of course, don’t need an Obama-era deadline to do so Demonize immigrant men. But the category of “military-aged males” lends an official veneer to the idea that young adults seeking work or asylum are actually an army of conquest. Encourage everyone to look at the huddled masses through the view of a drone.
The migration of this phrase from Obama’s CIA to anti-immigration rants should be a lesson to liberals and conservatives alike. Liberals who support an aggressive foreign policy, even i kinder, kinder he was terrified that Obama promised – could end up normalizing domestic repression. And even conservatives who rail against “forever wars” might allow the logic of those wars to live on, directed against the American homeland itself.