Probably. POWs were supposed to be kept in an environment similar to the one they were captured in; many were sent to the southwest. I knew an Afrika Korp guy who ended up in Arizona and never did go back to Germany.
Id there a path to citizenship from shooting at a countries soldiers and being a POW?
Many German POW’s were assigned to work as farm laborers. The farmers sometimes let them drive the farm trucks into town to pick up supplies at the general store. Nazi flags and framed photos of Hitler were allowed to be placed on the walls INSIDE the prisoner’s barracks at prison camps. The US government allowed that. Trying to deny history is wrong and stupid.
That's total crap … there were POW camps in the more remote areas of northern Canada that housed German POW's and they weren't captured on the eastern front … many brought over from England to alleviate POW congestion in Britain. These camps were so remote security was minimal … in some cases the prisoners were allowed to hunt game to enhance their provisions.
When I was in Germany in the mid-70s one of our gun chiefs was SSG Emmerich. I remember him telling us that his father was captured in North Africa in 1943 by the US Army and sent to a POW camp in Alabama. He said some soldiers were given the option to work on local farms as field hands. His father went to work for one of the local farmers until he was repatriated to Germany after the war. He and the farmer’s daughter had fallen in love and he applied to migrate to the US. He returned to Alabama, married the farmer’s daughter and they had several children, one of whom was SSG Emmerich.