Of the 474,861 deserters reported, the registration cards of 185,081 state that they are aliens. Of this number, 22,706 had declared their intention to become citizens, and were, therefore, subject to draft, while 129,268 had not declared such intention, and were, therefore, on proper proof of alienage, entitled to exemption. There were also 33,107 enemy aliens, who, of course, would not have been accepted in any event.
There are two main reasons for the large proportion of alien desertions. The first is that many aliens, knowing that under the selective-service law (and also, for many countries, by treaty) they were entitled to exemption, believed that, by stating on the registration cards that they were aliens, they had performed their full duty with respect to the draft; they ignored the regulations which required them to submit proof of alienage. The second is that many of them did not speak English, were ignorant of the laws and customs of this country, did not know that they were required to keep their local boards informed of their addresses, and failed to realize their obligations to this country under the selective-service law. And the difficulty experienced by the local boards in reading and writing their names frequently caused the mail notices addressed to these registrants to go astray.
Apart from the foregoing explanations, however, which would suffice to show that such aliens did not desert in the ordinary sense, but merely failed to come forward to claim their exemption, there was undoubtedly a large exodus of aliens from some of the border states, and those near to the seaboard, where the easiest course for these ignorant and misguided persons seemed to lie in flight beyond the national boundaries.
The figures upon which the Provost Marshal General thus comments are given by him in [Table XXXIV].[142]
TABLE XXXIV
Comparison of Reported Desertions of Alien and Citizen Registrants
| Desertions | Number |
| Total alien and citizen registrants, June 5, 1917 to Sept. 11, 1918 | 10,679,814 |
| Total desertions | 474,861 |
| Total alien registrants | 1,703,006 |
| Reported alien desertions | 185,081 |
| Total citizen registrants | 8,976,808 |
| Reported citizen desertions | 289,780 |
It is clear from these figures, and regardless of the allowances made by the Provost Marshal General, as quoted above, that nearly 11 out of every 100 aliens registered, as against a little more than 3 out of every 100 citizens, who, in one way or another evaded or sought to evade the draft; also that it is simply not true that “the proportion of desertions among the native born was about twice as great as among the foreign born.” True, the citizen-deserter percentage of the whole number of registrants is 2.71, as against an alien-deserter percentage of 1.75 ... but there were nearly six times as many citizen registrants as alien. In order even to equal the alien ratio, the citizen deserters would have had to be considerably more than three times as numerous as they were. But no such plausible excuses could have been made for them! There are no available figures to show how many of the citizens who thus evaded service were of foreign birth.