Serving the Patria? Italian Americans, Returning Migrants, and the Politics of Citizenship in Liberal and Fascist Italy

The chapter aims to analyze how military service in Italy for Italian Americans represented a point of diplomatic conflict between Italy and the United States, both during the liberal period and under fascism. According to the American principles of jus soli, those born in the United States to foreign parents were considered American citizens. However, the Italian law of 1912 established that the children of immigrants in the United States, born on American soil before their Italian fathers had been naturalized, were still required to serve in the Italian army once they traveled to Italy. Italian authorities detained hundreds of young Italian American citizens whenever they arrived in their country of origin, prompting interventions by American consulates. Only at the end of the 1920s, Mussolini decided to end the practice of detaining returnees and conscripting them into the military, although ambivalent policies regarding the military service of Italian Americans resurfaced during the Italo-Ethiopian War and in the second half of the 1930s.