When the United States entered the war, early in 1917, the instant necessity of raising a stupendous army swiftly out of our heterogeneous population injected an unprecedented factor into the question of naturalization. The body of native-born citizens, even together with the great mass of those among the foreign-born who were naturalized, was not sufficient. Aside from that, there were considerations of another character; such, for example, as were set forth by the Provost Marshal General of the Army:[120] As soon as the estimates of population made by the Census Bureau had been received, it began to be apparent that the rule of the Selective Service Act, which based the apportionment of quotas on total population, and yet drew the quotas from citizens and declarants only, would operate quite differently upon communities having largely differing percentages of aliens in their population. In certain local-board jurisdictions, in which the element of alien population exceeded 30 per cent of the total, the burden placed upon the citizen population was very great.... If in two communities of equal population the citizen population of one were 100 per cent of the whole and in the other 50 per cent, the remainder being composed of aliens, the two communities, though equal in population, in resources, in industries, and in need of labor, the efforts, and the enterprise of men of military age, would fall under a very unequal tax upon their man power. The all-citizen community would be required to furnish twice as many men as the half-citizen, half-alien community. POSITION OF THE ALIEN SOLDIER The Provost Marshal General[121] reported 1,243,801 aliens registered under the first draft, and estimated that of these (21-30) nearly half a million (457,713) had been called for examination, and 16.72 per cent--nearly 17 out of every hundred--certified for service; a few in ignorance of their right to exemption, but virtually all of them voluntarily waiving that right. The position of the aliens, even if they had declared their intention to become citizens, was unenviable. They still owed technical allegiance to European sovereignty--many of them to the nations with which we were formally or practically at war. Many of them were of the cobelligerent nations known as “the Allies,” but were here in evasion of military-service laws or other embarrassing legal obligations at home, making personally undesirable their return to the old country; and as for those of German, Austrian, Bulgarian, or Turkish nationality, there was for them short shrift--upon capture while fighting against armies of the Central Powers--only the dismal certainty of summary execution as traitors. Their only possible shadow of protection would lie in completed American citizenship.