Competing Faces of Citizenship Beyond Naturalization: Hmong Refugees and the Politics of Recognition in the United States After the Vietnam War

Abstract

This paper explores the historical relationship between refugee administration and refugees’ negotiations over citizenship through an analysis of Hmong refugees’ experiences in the United States. During the Vietnam War, approximately 50,000 Hmong soldiers were mobilized into the CIA-backed guerrilla unit as part of US anti-communist operations. Following the communist victory in 1975, Hmong refugees from Laos fled to Thailand and were later resettled in the United States. Previous scholarship primarily focused on either the legal dimension of Hmong naturalization or their process of Americanization. Studies on refugee incorporation and military naturalization have likewise interpreted citizenship as a legal status granted by the state. However, recognition as citizens extends beyond a legal membership unilaterally conferred by the nation-state. This article instead inquires how Hmong refugees in the United States negotiated over competing forms of citizenship and social recognition after the Secret War, and how the US government selectively incorporated those claims through militarized and other conditional forms of inclusion. To answer these questions, this paper approaches citizenship as a contested arena negotiated by the state and refugees themselves. Integrating legal and social history, the analysis examines both the top-down citizenship framework promoted through the Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act and the bottom-up citizenship practices advanced by Hmong communities. Drawing on archival materials ranging from Congressional records to local organizational documents in Minnesota, this study shows that veterans’ organizations set the basis of belonging on their wartime sacrifice, women’s and community organizations emphasized legal protection and social reproduction, and exile organizations sustained attachments across multiple homelands. This research also demonstrates that the United States eventually recognized Hmong belonging primarily through narratives of military loyalty and geopolitical usefulness. Ultimately, this research enriches the historiography of broader immigration, citizenship, and military studies by reconceptualizing refugee incorporation as a contested process of recognition rather than a linear path to national membership, while relativizing contemporary worldviews surrounding refugee protection, immigrant soldiers, and military naturalization.

1. Introduction

On 8 May 2026, Minnesota state legislators enacted the Veterans and Military Affairs Omnibus Bill, extending access to certain state veterans’ benefits for Hmong veterans who had served in the CIA-backed forces during the Secret War in Laos.1 More than two decades after the Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act of 2000 facilitated access to US citizenship for many former Hmong soldiers, debates over their recognition and inclusion had remained unresolved. The legislation did not simply grant them veterans’ benefits. It reflected the Hmong’s continuing struggles over how the United States and the local communities they resettled should remember the Hmong’s wartime service. The enactment also raised a broader question of whether legal citizenship is sufficient for them to secure full social recognition. The persistence of these controversies up to the present suggests that refugee incorporation cannot be understood solely as a linear transition from displacement to national membership in the host society.

To explain the historical roots of these continuing debates, this article explores the relationship between US refugee governance and the process through which Hmong refugees navigated their claims to recognition, belonging, and citizenship. It argues that the Hmong veterans, community organizations, and exile groups articulated multiple and divergent models of belonging that challenged imperial and racialized constructions of US citizenship. At the same time, the US government ultimately offered them only a narrow, militarized, and conditional form of inclusion that this article conceptualizes as “colonized citizenship.” Rather than understanding citizenship only as a legal status granted by the nation-state, this article interprets it as a contested arena actively negotiated among the state, local society, and refugees themselves.

The contemporary Hmong community in Minnesota emerged through a longer history of displacement, covert military mobilization, and refugee resettlement policies by the United States. The Hmong people originally lived in southern China and migrated to Indochina due to the Qing dynasty’s oppression in the early nineteenth century. Without a sovereign nation-state, the Hmong have historically lived in diasporic milieus. During the Vietnam War, the CIA clandestinely mobilized approximately 50,000 Hmong soldiers into the “Hmong Special Guerrilla Unit” as part of US anti-communist operations in Southeast Asia. An estimated 17,000 Hmong soldiers lost their lives, and the survivors later faced retaliation by communist leaders, forcing them to flee and seek refuge abroad (Hamilton-Merritt 1993). After 1975, the US government promoted the resettlement of about 130,000 Hmong refugees, including the soldiers and their families. Through refugee assistance networks, religious organizations, and subsequent chain migration, the Twin Cities metropolitan area in Minnesota, which is in the US Midwest, became one of the principal destinations for Hmong refugees. As of 2023, the US Census estimates that around 100,000 Hmong now reside in the state.

2. Literature Review

Much of the existing scholarship on refugees and citizenship has treated naturalization as a linear and inevitable process of incorporation into the nation-state. For example, classical refugee studies have often focused on political and legal aspects within a national framework, overlooking the social processes through which refugees negotiated citizenship (Bloemraad 2006; Loescher and Scanlan 1986; Tempo 2008).2 Within these understandings, scholars have narrowly interpreted citizenship as a legal status anchored in national belonging, while refugees have appeared primarily as objects of state management and incorporation rather than as political actors who articulated competing visions of belonging themselves. In response, this article examines the ways in which Hmong organizations strategically mobilized citizenship discourse and negotiated multiple, sometimes conflicting, forms of belonging in relation to the nation-state, local society, and refugee communities. While Mae Ngai and other historians have demonstrated how racialized legal exclusion structured the boundaries of US citizenship, this article demonstrates that imperial forms of inclusion also produced hierarchized and conditional modes of belonging even after formal incorporation.

Within Hmong studies, traditional Ethnic Studies have tacitly emphasized ethnic empowerment, focusing on their adaptation and the social process of Hmong people’s “Americanization” (Her and Buley-Meissner 2012; Pfeifer et al. 2013; C. Y. Vang 2010).3 More recent scholarship has critically examined how humanitarian narratives obscured the imperial violence underlying Hmong people’s naturalization (M. Vang 2021a).4 Building on these insights, this paper shifts attention from representation alone to the social practices through which Hmong refugees themselves navigated and contested these imposed frameworks, particularly through their claims to citizenship.

Simultaneously, the detailed analysis of citizenship acquisition by Asian immigrant soldiers also contributes to the studies of the military welfare state. Existing scholars have largely examined the legal development of preferential naturalization for immigrant soldiers and the incorporation of racialized auxiliaries and colonial troops into the nation-state through military service (Capozzola 2020; Goring 2000; Grillot 2018; Nakano 2000; Salyer 2004; Sohoni and Vafa 2010).5 Moving beyond this predominantly legal historiography, Olivier Burtin has delved into US veterans’ social movements for their benefits through the lens of “martial citizenship,” which is the analytical framework in which “military service set former service members apart from the rest of the population and entitled them to special consideration from the state” (Burtin 2022). Positioning the Hmong case within this broader historiography, the study underscores how the Hmong experience both fits within and exposes the imperial and racial logics that have long structured US veterans’ policies.

Beyond these legal and institutional questions, the politics of “recognition” as a veteran or citizen in the United States is not limited to the formal acquisition of naturalized citizenship granted by the nation-state. From the Civil War in the mid nineteenth century to the present, the US government has treated military service as evidence of ideal citizens, conferring citizenship on a wide range of populations, including African Americans, indigenous people, and Asian immigrant soldiers. However, access to these forms of recognition has historically been structured by racial and ethnic hierarchies. The benefits associated with military service have remained unequally distributed when compared with those available to white veterans. Traditional theories of citizenship, most notably T. H. Marshall’s classic account of its progressive expansion from civil, political, to social rights, understands citizenship as a cumulative and institutionalized route toward equality (Marshall and Bottomore [1950] 1992). Recent citizenship studies, however, have challenged seeing citizenship solely as a legal status granted by the nation-state. For instance, Isin’s emphasis on acts of citizenship highlights how political actors become citizens through claims-making and practices of participation, while Soysal’s analysis of post national rights demonstrates that belonging may exceed a single national framework (Ishin and Nielsen 2008; Soysal 1994). Building on these insights, this paper adopts a more expansive view of citizenship as a contested arena in which refugees shape, resist, and negotiate their claims to belonging.

From this perspective, the article conceptualizes Hmong claims to citizenship through several analytically distinct but historically interconnected forms of belonging. Specifically, “martial citizenship” and “naturalized citizenship” have long been used as analytical categories to describe different ways in which Hmong veterans, community organizations, and refugee networks articulated their claims to recognition through military service, legal security, social reproduction, and civic incorporation. By contrast, “nomadic citizenship” is a historical term used by some Hmong exile organizations to describe their attachments that exceeded a single territorial state. The article further develops the concept of “colonized citizenship” to explain the hierarchical and conditional form of inclusion ultimately institutionalized by the US state. Colonized citizenship refers to a form of membership extended to populations displaced through imperial intervention, in which legal inclusion occurs without full recognition of historical responsibility, political reciprocity, or substantive equality.

To explore the conflicts between US refugee governance and competing Hmong claims to citizenship, this article employs qualitative historical analysis based on archival materials produced between the late 1970s and the early 2000s. The core sources include Congressional records, debates on the Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act, and manuscripts of Hmong organizations in Minnesota. Although California became home to the largest Hmong population after the initial refugee resettlement, this study adopts Minnesota as a strategic case rather than a representative sample because it contains an abundant concentration of archival materials documenting interactions among refugee organizations, veterans’ groups, social service institutions, and state actors. These sources allow us to trace how different Hmong actors articulated competing claims to citizenship, belonging, and recognition. The article also utilizes national-level materials such as Congressional debates and federal legislation to examine the forms of recognition authorized by the US government, while Minnesota-based archival collections are used to reconstruct refugee practices of belonging and political claims-making. Although some of the citizenship discourses analyzed here circulated beyond Minnesota, this study does not claim that Minnesota represents the experience of all Hmong communities in the United States. Instead, it uses the Minnesota case to illuminate the relationship between local refugee politics and national processes of citizenship recognition. Sources were selected when they documented claims about citizenship, belonging, naturalization, veterans’ recognition, or refugee incorporation. Rather than treating these materials as transparent descriptions of refugee experience, the study reads them as competing claims about refugee belonging.

By integrating perspectives of legal and social history, this study illuminates various fraught processes of seeking not only legal membership but also social recognition and legitimacy in a nation that once relied on their military work yet offered them a form of conditional inclusion in return. The article first examines the deliberative process of the Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act of 2000 and demonstrates how the US legislators framed Hmong inclusion through militarized and conditional narratives of loyalty and sacrifice. Next, it closely analyzes multiple forms of citizenship articulated by various Hmong communities beyond legal membership, focusing on ethnic organizations and engagements with civil society. Through the analysis of both top-down and bottom-up constructions of citizenship, this paper elucidates the limitations of a linear model of incorporation premised on exclusive membership to a single nation-state by examining competing ideals of citizenship envisioned by both the nation and the refugees themselves.

3. Citizenship Granted by the United States

The Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act of 2000 emerged from political struggles in which Hmong organizations articulated demands rooted in refugee protection, wartime sacrifice, and postwar abandonment. Yet the US government ultimately recognized these demands primarily through militarized discourses of loyalty and patriotic sacrifice. This act facilitated the naturalization of up to 45,000 Hmong soldiers who had served in the Special Guerrilla Unit and their spouses by waiving English proficiency requirements and granting special consideration on civics tests. Both measures addressed major barriers that many first-generation Hmong refugees had faced in obtaining US citizenship.6 While policymakers framed the legislation as a limited immigration measure, it emerged within a much broader political context in which debates over citizenship, refugee governance, and US responsibility toward former Cold War allies had become increasingly contested.

In addition to the strict naturalization requirements for the Hmong people, welfare reforms during the 1990s shaped the immediate political context behind the legislation. For example, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 restricted access to public assistance for non-citizens. This act disproportionately affected elderly Hmong refugees who struggled to acquire US citizenship because of limited English proficiency and disrupted educational backgrounds resulting from war and displacement.7 While some individuals protested these exclusions through acts of suicide, such objections alone failed to break the status quo (Xiong 2022). Within this context, mainstream Hmong organizations actively mobilized claims rooted in refugee displacement and moral obligation to demand preferential naturalization and formal recognition by the US state.

Among the organizations involved in these campaigns, the Lao Veterans of America (LVA) played a particularly important role by emphasizing wartime sacrifices (Xiong 2022). During congressional hearings in 1997, Wangyee Vang, the founder of the LVA, argued that although the CIA had evacuated around 25,000 Hmong military elites after 1975, the rank-and-file had been abandoned and left vulnerable to communist persecution.8 On this basis, he asserted that the United States owed a “special obligation” to Hmong veterans.9 These claims framed preferential naturalization not merely as immigration reform but as partial recognition of wartime sacrifice, forced displacement, and postwar abandonment following the US-backed military operation.

At the same time, the political language through which Hmong organizations articulated these claims did not fully correspond to the institutional framework that the US government ultimately used to recognize them. Hmong organizations frequently connected citizenship to refugee protection, family stability, historical responsibility, and postwar survival. However, as these demands entered congressional debates, legislators increasingly translated them into a narrower narrative centered on military loyalty and patriotic sacrifice through wartime service by portraying the Hmong as loyal wartime allies whose military sacrifices demonstrated their commitment to American ideals.

Minnesota legislators played a crucial role in constructing this narrative in Congress.10 The proponents narrated the Hmong as “patriotic allies” who had risked their lives for freedom and democratic values.11 For example, Senator Paul Wellstone mentioned that the legislation “acknowledges their service and officially recognizes the service of Hmong and other ethnic Lao veterans who sacrificed and loyally fought for America and its principles of freedom, human rights, and democracy,” positioning it as continuing American tradition of military naturalization.12 Other lawmakers similarly emphasized the role of Hmong soldiers, stating that “Hmong forces were responsible for risking their lives by crossing enemy lines to rescue downed American pilots,” and explained that “they saved at least 60 American lives and often lost half their troops rescuing one soldier.”13 Through such rhetoric, legislators framed the Hmong not primarily as refugees displaced by US intervention but as loyal anti-communist allies who had already demonstrated Americanness through military labor performed on behalf of the United States.

By the time the legislation passed unanimously in 2000, this militarized discourse had become dominant in the congressional debates. During House debates, Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde quoted Representative Bruce Vento’s statement that “they probably have passed the most important test, Mr. Chairman, and that is risking their lives for the values and beliefs that we revere as Americans and saving American lives.”14 Therefore, US citizenship appeared not as a universal right or humanitarian obligation but as a reward for wartime service performed for the sake of US geopolitical interests. President Bill Clinton reinforced this interpretation when signing the legislation into law, describing the Hmong as wartime allies who had fought side by side with the United States in Southeast Asia, but failed to be US citizens because of their lack of linguistic knowledge (Clinton 2000). In these ways, the US state transformed a history of covert warfare and displacement into a redemptive narrative of patriotic alliance and benevolent national inclusion.

The Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act thus institutionalized a conditional form of belonging grounded not in equal membership or refugee protection, but in military usefulness to US geopolitical interests. Although Hmong organizations articulated claims rooted in refugee displacement, postwar survival, and historical responsibility, congressional debates increasingly translated these claims into narratives of wartime loyalty and service. In this process, the United States subsumed complex refugee experiences into a narrower structure of wartime alliance, thereby recognizing Hmong belonging only insofar as it was tied to US imperial and military interests. Yet Hmong communities themselves articulated broader and sometimes competing understandings of citizenship that extended beyond this state-sanctioned logic. As the following sections address, Hmong refugees mobilized multiple forms of citizenship that encompassed recognition of military service (martial citizenship), a practical means of securing long-term rootedness after displacement (naturalized citizenship), and membership across multiple homelands (nomadic citizenship). The tensions between these refugee practices of belonging and state-centered modes of recognition ultimately illuminate the hierarchical structure of incorporation that this article conceptualizes as “colonized citizenship.”

4. Negotiating Citizenship with the US State

Although the Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act of 2000 institutionalized a militarized and conditional form of inclusion, Hmong communities themselves articulated broader and competing understandings of citizenship in their negotiations with the US state. In the 1980s and 1990s, the tightening of welfare policies, naturalization requirements, and refugee governance intensified debates over belonging within Hmong communities nationwide. Situating Minnesota within these broader national transformations, this section examines how Hmong organizations articulated competing understandings of citizenship in response to racialized exclusion, wartime displacement, and institutional pressures of US incorporation. In particular, Hmong communities mobilized two distinct yet sometimes overlapping models of belonging: martial citizenship, which was grounded on the state recognition in their military service and sacrifice, and naturalized citizenship, which emphasized legal protection, family stability, and socioeconomic survival as the basis of legitimate membership within US society beyond the framework of wartime service alone.

4.1. Martial Citizenship

First and foremost, Hmong veterans demanded martial citizenship, which was anchored in the state recognition of wartime service. “Martial citizenship” refers to a framework in which military service distinguishes veterans from the rest of the population and legitimizes their claims to special recognition and benefits from the state (Burtin 2022). Within this logic, wartime sacrifice established a reciprocal relationship between soldiers and the nation, transforming past military service into a basis for national membership. In the United States, this structure has historically shaped both military naturalization policies and veterans’ welfare programs, whereby military service has served as a traditional pathway to membership in the nation-state.

Hmong veterans strategically mobilized this language to argue that their sacrifices entitled them to preferential naturalization and recognition as official US veterans, while veterans’ claims and media representations often served different political functions. Veterans themselves frequently emphasized their experiences of abandonment and their sense of obligation, framing citizenship as compensation for unfulfilled wartime promises.15 By contrast, local and national media coverage often translated these demands into patriotic narratives centered on loyalty to the United States and devotion to democratic ideals.

For example, the St. Paul Pioneer Press published a series titled “Forgotten Veterans,” repeatedly highlighting such episodes as Hmong soldiers rescuing wounded US servicemen while suffering severe physical injuries.16 In one interview, Cherzong Vang, a president of the Minnesota branch of the Lao Veterans of America (LVA), recalled that “The American jets fall in the high mountains, and these guys hurry to save American soldiers. They don’t worry about if they die, they don’t worry about who’s going to shoot them. Don’t they deserve to be American citizens?”17 Such statements framed citizenship not simply as legal incorporation but as recognition for wartime sacrifice and abandonment after the war.

Along with these veterans, other former soldiers similarly described naturalization through militarized language. Yee Vang, who had been recruited as a child soldier and later severely wounded, held up wartime photographs and recalled, “The Americans asked us to help, and we knew that maybe we had a chance to win. So we helped them with all our hearts.”18 Furthermore, Tou Yang, Van Ger Yang, and Lor Cha Yang also testified that they felt “already American at heart,” while depicting the naturalization tests as “one more battle for the Hmong.”19 These narratives reflected how veterans deliberately articulated their deservingness within a sociopolitical environment that increasingly rewarded military loyalty as proof of belonging, thereby transforming citizenship not as a top-down process of civic incorporation but as delayed recognition of sacrifices already rendered. Consequently, they articulated a distinctly martial conception of citizenship in which those who had risked their lives for Americans deserved recognition as US citizens themselves.

At the same time, media coverage often translated these demands into celebratory narratives of patriotism and military loyalty. Newspaper articles emphasized battlefield heroism, physical scars, and devotion to democratic ideals while paying far less attention to coercive CIA recruitment, wartime displacement, or postwar abandonment. Therefore, public discourse incorporated Hmong veterans into Cold War narratives of patriotic alliance. As a result, the US government narrowed the broader claims for recognition, reciprocity, and historical accountability articulated by Hmong veterans and their organizations, and muted the unequal imperial relationships that structured the Secret War itself.

Broader transformations in immigration and welfare policies during the 1990s drove these activities for martial citizenship. The same article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that the proposed bill to make English the official language, stricter naturalization requirements, and welfare reforms directly affected elderly Hmong refugees who struggled with English proficiency after decades of displacement.20 Simultaneously, political discourse increasingly portrayed refugees as burdens upon the welfare state, and organizational records implied widely shared resentment over the lack of recognition for past military service.21 In response, veterans’ organizations mobilized military sacrifice as a counter-narrative to these racialized exclusions.

Within this context, martial citizenship thus functioned not simply as a patriotic expression but as a strategic response to both institutional exclusion and social discrimination from the host country. Ultimately, this logic enabled the incorporation of the population who had never been imagined as future citizens. At the same time, this conception also reproduced internal hierarchies within Hmong communities, privileging male combatants while marginalizing women and non-combatants whose labor sustained refugee survival and community reconstruction. In particular, the Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act of 2000, spearheaded largely by male military leaders, reinforced these gendered distinctions, in which men were treated as the primary applicants, while their spouses obtained citizenship through derivative status. The legislation therefore institutionalized gender inequalities within the legal process of naturalization. Hence, although veterans’ claims challenged social exclusion, they also reinforced gendered definitions of political worth rooted in military masculinity.

4.2. Naturalized Citizenship

In contrast to veterans’ organizations, other Hmong organizations articulated a markedly different understanding of citizenship. Rather than grounding belonging in wartime sacrifice, these groups instead defined citizenship through legal protection, family stability, and the reconstruction of everyday life after displacement. This mode, which might be understood as “naturalized citizenship,” treated legal membership as a means of securing durable livelihoods, educational opportunities, economic mobility, and protection from deportation. For refugees, earning legal citizenship in the host country enabled them to bring over their relatives who had remained in refugee camps as one of the rights granted under the US refugee policies. Citizenship here functioned less as symbolic national recognition than as a mechanism for social reproduction and long-term community survival.

The organization that most clearly advanced this logic was Lao Family Community (LFC). LFC was incorporated in 1977 under the leadership of General Vang Pao. Its Minnesota Branch especially developed during the early years of Hmong resettlement.22 In a 1982 letter to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, the Minnesota branch argued that “Soon we will become American citizens… To be good citizens of the great land of America, we must be able to read, comprehend, and write English” and requested funding for English-language programs and driver’s education for household.23 The letter emphasized that becoming “the most productive people of America,” demonstrating that LFC actively promoted the acquisition of US citizenship and viewed civic incorporation as inseparable from economic self-sufficiency.

Women’s organizations also emphasized these forms of civic participation and belonging. For example, the Women’s Association of Hmong and Lao organized home economics and vocational programs intended to facilitate their long-term settlement in US society.24 Similarly, the Association for the Advancement of Hmong Women in Minnesota promoted English-language instruction, employment training, and civic education for Hmong women.25 These organizations were established in 1979 and 1981 respectively by Hmong women such as Choua Thao, Gaoly Yang, and Ly Vang, and initially focused on issues of domestic violence (Hillmer 2015; C. Y. Vang 2010). At the same time, they gradually organized vocational training, civic education, and employment-related programs intended to facilitate long-term settlement in the United States. These organizations did not frame citizenship primarily in terms of patriotic loyalty or military recognition as male military leaders envisioned. Instead, they connected citizenship to such questions as caregiving, education, and the ability to sustain family life under precarious conditions.

This logic implied an alternative understanding of belonging fundamentally different from martial citizenship, while both sought incorporation into the American political community. Whereas martial citizenship treated their rights as compensation for wartime sacrifice, naturalized citizenship framed legal membership as necessary for social survival and collective stability. Community-oriented Hmong organizations emphasized voting rights, employment access, education, and housing ownership because they understood these resources as prerequisites for establishing permanent futures in the United States rather than as rewards for patriotic service.

The Hmong American Partnership (HAP), founded in St. Paul in 1990 by T. Christopher Thao, clearly articulated the logic of naturalized citizenship.26 A 1993 HAP report warned that low naturalization rates hindered the economic stability of Hmong communities and directly linked the debates of citizenship to broader political and socioeconomic issues, including poverty reduction, educational mobility, and democratic participation.27 The report explicitly identified socioeconomic advancement as an urgent priority for the community by stating as follows:

“We need to begin establishing roots in this country. If we do not own housing, if we do not have the right to vote, we can not contribute fully to the social environment our children will inherit. We need a mandate to work—our children living in non-working families are being raised in severely disadvantaged economic conditions. These conditions will color their future and our shared chances for a vital and productive community. We need to continue to take advantage of and improve upon the educational opportunities currently available so that our adults have the educational skills needed to work and our children succeed at the post-secondary level.”28

Rather than emphasizing battlefield heroism, the HAP framed citizenship as an essential tool for “establishing roots” in the United States and ensuring that future generations could participate fully in US society.29 Hence, programs such as citizenship education, English-language instruction, and office skills training aimed at not merely integrating into the US society but securing collective stability under conditions of refugee vulnerability. In this model, naturalized citizenship functioned less as a symbolic marker of national belonging than as a practical means of achieving socioeconomic independence, intergenerational mobility, and long-term community survival.

This effort reflected the broader structures of US refugee governance. During the 1980s and 1990s, federal and state policies emphasized rapid refugee self-sufficiency through labor participation and civic integration. Government agencies and social-service programs expected refugees to become economically productive and respectable citizens through language acquisition, employment training, and educational advancement.30 One of the refugee policies was the dispersal strategy for resettlement, which aimed to prevent the concentration of refugee populations and promote their assimilation but actually disrupted clan networks (C. Y. Vang 2010). Hmong organizations responded pragmatically to these institutional pressures by helping community members navigate the demands of settlement and legal incorporation while seeking greater stability and respectability for refugee families.

At the same time, fears surrounding deportation and forced repatriation profoundly shaped demands for naturalized citizenship. Congressional testimonies and organizational records documented widespread anxieties over refugee camp closures in Thailand and the forced deportation of Hmong refugees to Laos.31 For many Hmong families, citizenship promised not only personal legal security but also the possibility of family reunification and protection for transnational kin networks dispersed by war and displacement. Therefore, legal membership represented permanence and protection after decades of instability.

Consequently, the pursuit of naturalized citizenship represented more than a desire for assimilation into US society. Hmong organizations articulated a distinctly non-martial vision of belonging centered on stable foothold, protection, and the reconstruction of community life after the war. Among them, gendered divisions of labor remained central to this logic. Whereas martial citizenship privileged male veterans as embodiments of sacrifice, naturalized citizenship depended upon women’s labor in caregiving, education, and household economic management. In these ways, this mode of aspiration for naturalized citizenship expanded political belonging beyond military service by grounding citizenship in community survival and social reproduction.

5. Nomadic and Colonized Citizenship

While many Hmong organizations negotiated citizenship through military recognition and sociolegal membership within the United States, other Hmong actors articulated still different forms of belonging that exceeded the territorial assumptions underlying the modern nation-state. They did not necessarily reject US citizenship itself but sustained political and emotional attachments across multiple geographic spaces shaped by displacement, exile, and the legacies of resistance movements. This section examines how some Hmong organizations and individuals articulated fragmented yet persistent forms of belonging beyond a singular national attachment, which they call “nomadic citizenship.”32 It then juxtaposes these refugee-centered visions of belonging with the narrow form of incorporation ultimately recognized by the US state, which this article conceptualizes as “colonized citizenship.” Examining these forms of citizenship together reveals the fundamental tensions between refugees’ own imaginations of belonging and the state’s selective, militarized, and hierarchical recognition of them.

5.1. Nomadic Citizenship

Not all Hmong understandings of citizenship neatly fit within the frameworks of either martial recognition or legal membership in the United States. Alongside demands for veterans’ recognition and naturalization, some Hmong organizations articulated forms of belonging that exceeded the territorial framework of a single nation-state. These imaginaries were often fragmented and uneven rather than fully coherent ideological concepts. Nevertheless, they reflected historically specific ways of imagining belonging shaped by displacement, statelessness, and the memory of resistance movements.

Some Hmong organizations and activists themselves described these forms of belonging as “nomadic citizenship.”33 Rather than simply expressing nostalgia for their homelands, this language reflected a broader attempt to articulate political belonging across multiple sites of displacement and resettlement. Nomadic citizenship differed from transnational nationalism in important respects. The Hmong who advanced this vision did not primarily seek incorporation into the United States, nor did they necessarily understand their attachments through the framework of crossing national borders. What later appeared as “transnational” from the perspective of modern nation-states did not fit the Hmong historical and cultural world that predated and exceeded the boundaries imposed by those states. Instead, “nomadic citizenship” articulated forms of mobility and attachment dispersed across multiple homelands and sites of settlement. Whereas transnationalism often presumes a stable relationship between nation, territory, and sovereignty, the language of nomadic citizenship emerged precisely from the instability of those relationships within Hmong history.

This orientation appeared most explicitly in the political activities of the Hmong Council, which advocated recognition of “quadrilateral citizenship” spanning China, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.34 Rather than envisioning unrestricted mobility alone, the organization sought a political framework through which dispersed Hmong communities could secure dignity, cultural survival, and political rights beyond state boundaries. For example, Tou Long, the representative of the Hmong Council, stated that “Hmong need your help! We the Hmong have been called primitive, wronged in war, wronged in peace, highest illiteracy rate, poorest people in Aisa, labeled as ‘Jews in Asia,’ abandoned by American allies, lacking basic citizenship rights.”35 In 1986, the Council promulgated the Hmong Charter, circulating and invoking formal recognition of this “nomadic citizenship” regime.36 Organizational documents further emphasized that “quadrilateral citizenship” sought to unite Hmong, Miao, and Montagnard peoples, asserting their collective rights to live across borders.37 Although such proposals never developed into a unified political movement, they nevertheless demonstrated attempts to conceptualize belonging beyond the structure of singular national citizenship.

While Hmong military leaders in California largely led this initiative, similar orientations toward multiple forms of belonging also appeared in Minnesota. At a 1980 Hmong New Year celebration in St. Paul, attended by approximately 6000 participants, Ly Teng, a president of the Lao Family Community, declared that “we are Hmong with Laotian Nationality,” affirming their continued attachment to Laos.38 Local newspapers likewise reported Hmong voices insisting that they had their “hearts in Laos.”39 Survey data further illustrated this ambivalence toward national belonging. A 1982 survey found that only 28 percent of Hmong respondents preferred life in the United States to life in Laos, while a large majority expressed a desire to return.40 Even among naturalized citizens, many first-generation Hmong reportedly resisted identifying themselves simply as “American.”41

These nomadic citizenship claims also intersected with the broader context of postwar resistance politics. For many former Hmong soldiers, the Secret War did not end in 1975 (H. Vang 2010). Throughout the 1980s, exiled Hmong military leaders organized resistance movements that framed the Secret War as ongoing rather than concluded. Organizations such as the United Lao National Liberation Front (Neo Hom), led by Vang Pao, mobilized financial and political support from Hmong communities across the United States, including Minnesota (H. Vang 2010).42 These movements sustained strong hopes of return to homelands, while simultaneously discouraging complete assimilation into US society.

By the 1990s, however, these projects gradually encountered structural and political limitations. Internal scandals and accusations of corruption within exile organizations, combined with post-9/11 US security policies that associated transnational militancy with terrorism, rendered such activism increasingly precarious.43 Vang Pao’s arrest and the decline of organized anti-communist resistance gradually narrowed the possibilities for imagining collective futures outside the framework of incorporation into US society (Baird and Hillmer 2020).44 Nevertheless, fragmented attachments to multiple homelands persisted even as many Hmong refugees pursued legal membership in the United States.

Hence, some Hmong organizations envisioned their citizenship based on attachments to their homelands as a moral, political, and affective anchor, while revealing ambivalence toward complete incorporation into the United States. Nomadic citizenship did not constitute a coherent alternative to national citizenship so much as it revealed the instability of citizenship itself within refugee experience. However, Hmong claims of belonging exceeded the framework of T. H. Marshall’s classical understanding of the historical expansion of citizenship rights, pointing to historically contingent politics of belonging shaped by war, displacement, and imperial entanglement. The following section, therefore, examines how the US state selectively recognized certain forms of Hmong belonging while marginalizing others, producing a hierarchical structure of incorporation.

5.2. Colonized Citizenship

The tensions between Hmong understandings of citizenship and the legal framework ultimately institutionalized by the US legislators reveal the limits of incorporation into the United States. While Hmong organizations themselves articulated broader and competing forms of belonging grounded in military recognition, rootedness, and attachment to multiple homelands, the US government ultimately recognized only those claims compatible with US geopolitical interests and national narratives. The gap between these refugee practices of belonging and the forms of recognition granted by the US state illuminates what this article conceptualizes as “colonized citizenship,” a narrow and conditional form of membership structured along imperial and racial lines, based on the premise of fulfilling the obligations demanded by US diplomatic interests, while preserving broader structures of dependency, paternalism, and imperial authority.

More precisely, colonized citizenship describes a conditional form of inclusion, in which displaced persons are granted formal legal membership, yet remain excluded from full acknowledgment of historical responsibility and retrospective justice. The concept does not describe the absence of citizenship, but it identifies a hierarchical form of inclusion in which the host country recognizes selected forms of loyalty and service while leaving unresolved relations of power that produced displacement in the first place. In other words, colonized citizenship describes not merely delayed or incomplete inclusion, but the incorporation of displaced wartime allies through a framework that recognizes their service while refusing full accountability for the imperial conditions that produced their displacement.

At first glance, the Hmong case appears to resemble what Burtin has termed martial citizenship. Indeed, some Hmong veterans frequently grounded their demands for recognition in military sacrifice and wartime loyalty. However, the framework ultimately institutionalized by the United States differed in important respects. Martial citizenship presumes a reciprocal relationship between former soldiers and the nation-state, in which military service entitles veterans to benefits and honorable recognition from the nation-state. In the Hmong case, by contrast, the US state had never imagined incorporating them as citizens, and the recognition did not emerge from an equal relationship between the Hmong and the nation. Rather, it was selectively extended to a racialized auxiliary population whose military labor had served US geopolitical objectives abroad. The US state incorporated the Hmong not primarily as veterans deserving compensation but as loyal wartime allies whose inclusion reaffirmed American narratives of benevolence. For this reason, their incorporation is better understood as colonized citizenship rather than martial citizenship alone.

Importantly, colonized citizenship refers neither to second-class citizenship nor to formal colonial subjecthood. The United States never legally colonized the Hmong people in the conventional sense. Nevertheless, its relationship with the Hmong emerged through a distinctly colonial configuration of power. During the Secret War in Laos, the CIA mobilized the Hmong soldiers as anti-communist auxiliaries while avoiding direct military accountability. After 1975, the resulting refugee crisis was inseparable from the very intervention that the United States had orchestrated. Consequently, the terms through which the US government later recognized Hmong belonging remained deeply entangled with imperial relationships of military dependency, displacement, and geopolitical utility.

Congressional debates surrounding the Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act of 2000 clearly revealed this structure. The covert recruitment of the Hmong people by the CIA and the later marginalization and delayed public recognition of their military contribution, created an inherently unequal relationship between the United States and the Hmong. The legislation foregrounded neither the US wartime culpability nor the illegality of covert operations but rather a narrative of heroic Hmong fighters’ contributions to the US cause during the Cold War (M. Vang 2021b). The legislative debates consistently framed the Hmong as heroic wartime allies who had demonstrated loyalty to the United States through military sacrifice. Consequently, such rhetoric effectively transformed wartime military labor into evidence of deservingness and elided the more contentious aspects of US imperial intervention, replacing them with a redemptive image of an honorable nation extending citizenship to its wartime allies. References to the CIA’s covert recruitment of Hmong fighters, the destruction generated by the Secret War, and broader questions of US responsibility for the refugee crisis remained largely absent. By foregrounding narratives of heroic Hmong soldiers, congressional debates displaced attention away from the imperial origins of Hmong refugeehood.

Therefore, US citizenship functioned not merely as a mechanism of legal incorporation but also as a means of managing historical memory. Through the language of loyalty, sacrifice, and patriotic alliance, the United States converted a history of covert military mobilization into a redemptive narrative of mutual partnership. The national framework of the US state has tried to remember the Hmong primarily as faithful allies who had fought for American values rather than as a population displaced by US intervention. In this sense, naturalization simultaneously recognized part of the Hmong contributions while obscuring the unequal power relations that had produced their displacement. The granting of citizenship thus served not only to incorporate former allies but also to stabilize a morally coherent narrative of American benevolence.

The conditional nature of this recognition becomes even more apparent when situated within the longer history of US refugee policy. Contrary to later narratives of humanitarian rescue, the United States initially demonstrated limited willingness to assume responsibility for large numbers of Hmong refugees after 1975. Policymakers frequently prioritized administrative containment, camp closure, and eventual repatriation over expansive refugee protection. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, many Hmong refugees remained in precarious legal situations while debates over forced return intensified. The United States first attempted to disengage from the consequences of the Secret War and only later extended recognition under carefully circumscribed conditions.45 Hence, recognition through facilitated naturalization emerged not as the fulfillment of a longstanding commitment to wartime allies but as a delayed and highly selective form of incorporation.

This conditionality persisted even after formal naturalization through the Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act in 2000. Although the Act facilitated access to US citizenship, it did not grant Hmong soldiers full recognition as official US veterans. During the final House debates, Representative Ron Kind acknowledged this contradiction, noting that the Hmong were not admitted as official veterans even after naturalization.46 State actors thus celebrated Hmong loyalty by granting national membership while simultaneously refusing to guarantee their full systemic inclusion.

Furthermore, legislators also framed refugee incorporation through paternalistic humanitarian narratives that reinforced imperial hierarchy. For example, Representative Bruce Vento described acceptance of Hmong refugees as humanitarian benevolence rather than redress.47 He even romanticized Hmong resettlement in Minnesota as a revitalizing force for the state’s “Scandinavian tradition.”48 Such rhetoric represented the granting of national membership as a hierarchical form of inclusion rather than partial compensation for displacement produced through US covert warfare.

Therefore, “colonized citizenship” illuminates how imperial forms of incorporation persisted even after formal legal inclusion in the nation-state. The Hmong were recognized insofar as they could be incorporated into narratives of loyalty, sacrifice, and Cold War partnership, yet alternative understandings of belonging remained marginalized. Accordingly, the Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act did not simply expand citizenship rights to refugees deserving protection. Rather, it selectively translated diverse refugee claims into a militarized and administratively manageable form of belonging grounded in loyalty, sacrifice, and geopolitical usefulness. US Citizenship thus became a selective mechanism through which the state recognized certain forms of belonging while rendering others invisible.

At the same time, Hmong refugees were never merely passive subjects under state incorporation. As the previous sections demonstrated, Hmong organizations continuously negotiated, contested, and exceeded the narrow institutional form through which the US government sought to define them. The tensions between martial, naturalized, and nomadic forms of belonging on the one hand, and the conditional structures of US incorporation on the other, ultimately reveal citizenship as an uneven and contested field shaped by refugee agency, concealed US empire, and the enduring hierarchies of imperial governance.

6. Conclusions

This article has examined how Hmong refugees in the United States negotiated multiple and competing forms of citizenship in the aftermath of the US intervention and refugee administration. Instead of understanding their incorporation as a linear transition from refugeehood to stable national citizenship, the Hmong case uncovers that refugee governance functioned not simply as a bureaucratic mechanism for managing displaced populations but as a dynamic and contested arena in which refugees actively negotiated the meanings and boundaries of citizenship. Hmong communities did not passively await the conferral of legal status by the Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act of 2000. Rather, they strategically mobilized the contours of pluralistic citizenship in relation to intended audiences, institutional constraints, and changing political contexts from below.

In particular, this article identified three overlapping, yet competing models of citizenship articulated within Hmong communities. First, martial citizenship grounded belonging in military sacrifice and wartime loyalty, through which veterans and their organizations demanded recognition for military service to the United States. By mobilizing dominant American narratives of patriotism, sacrifice, and national service, Hmong veterans intentionally appealed to the moral logic of the US military welfare state. Second, naturalized citizenship emphasized a form of belonging grounded in social reproduction rather than military duties. Women’s organizations, refugee support networks, and community associations framed citizenship less as symbolic recognition than as a practical mechanism for emphasizing self-reliance and respectability within US society in reaction to racialized portrayals of refugee dependency. Nomadic citizenship, meanwhile, articulated attachments that extended beyond a single nation-state and reflected alternative political imaginaries grounded in displacement, memory, and aspirations to return to their homelands. In this context, multiple citizenship emerged not as a fixed legal status or a linear endpoint of integration but as a historically contingent and strategically negotiated practice.

At the same time, the US state ultimately institutionalized only a narrow framework of inclusion grounded in military usefulness. The Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act of 2000 symbolized this selective incorporation. The legislation facilitated naturalization of Hmong people only insofar as it aligned with US imperial and military interests, framing their belonging primarily through narratives of wartime sacrifice, patriotism, and loyalty to American values rather than through humanitarian responsibility or universal equality. This article conceptualized such a hierarchical incorporation as colonized citizenship, a mode of incorporation through which the United States selectively granted legal inclusion to racialized wartime allies while preserving broader structures of imperial dependency, paternalism, and conditional recognition.

The significance of this framework extends beyond the Hmong case. For refugee studies, the article challenges frameworks that treat incorporation as a linear progression from displacement to national membership and instead highlights recognition as a contested process shaped by refugees, communities, and state institutions. For citizenship studies, it demonstrates that legal naturalization does not necessarily resolve questions of belonging, reciprocity, and historical accountability. Formal membership may coexist with continuing hierarchies of recognition produced through wartime relationships. For the history of military incorporation and postcolonial governance, the Hmong case reveals a distinctive trajectory in which populations were first mobilized through covert imperial warfare, then displaced by the consequences of that intervention, and only later selectively incorporated through narratives of loyalty and sacrifice. Seen in this light, colonized citizenship is not simply a Hmong phenomenon but a broader analytical lens for understanding populations whose displacement originates in imperial intervention and whose inclusion remains conditional upon geopolitical usefulness. The Hmong experience thus invites contemporary discussion to rethink citizenship not as the endpoint of refugeehood but as an ongoing struggle over recognition, responsibility, reciprocity, and the afterlives of empire.

At the same time, this study shows how imperial intervention can continue to structure citizenship after displacement and naturalization. As the 2026 bill suggests, state-sponsored commemorations of Hmong military service demonstrate the enduring prestige attached to past military sacrifices, while such state-sanctioned narratives systematically continue to obscure historical injustices and unequal burdens they have been living with.49 Yet these legacies have never gone uncontested. The growing visibility of Hmong women in political activity and community leadership suggests the emergence of alternative forms of citizenship that are not dependent upon military sacrifice as the primary basis of belonging.50 In this sense, contemporary Hmong communities should be understood as a dynamic arena in which the legacies of martial citizenship coexist with ongoing efforts to redefine such a gendered membership through community re-building, intergenerational change, and broader forms of civic participation.

More broadly, this study challenges nation-centered assumptions embedded within both refugee governance and classical understandings of citizenship by moving beyond the narrow framework of formal legal membership. International refugee regimes have historically presumed that displaced populations ultimately settle within a single nation-state through legal incorporation. Yet Hmong history demonstrates that refugees may sustain overlapping forms of attachment, mobility, and imagination that cannot be fully reduced to singular territorial belonging. Rather than a linear developmental process of assimilation into a unified national community, Hmong refugee incorporation emerged as a contested process shaped by Cold War geopolitics, local and federal policies, and refugee practices themselves. Such a perspective reveals refugee agency not only in negotiating inclusion within the nation-state but also in imagining alternative modes of belonging beyond the national framework. Therefore, the Hmong experience invites a more expansive understanding of citizenship as deeply entangled with war, displacement, and empire.