US Territorial Citizenship Today: Four Interpretations

All of the inhabited territories annexed before 1898 were governed as states-in-the-making and then admitted as states. Since 1898, however, none of the inhabited territories annexed by the United States has been granted statehood (Congressional Research Service 1985). [...]drawing on a generous rea...

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Published inPS, political science & politics Vol. 50; no. 2; pp. 515 - 519
Main Author Venator-Santiago, Charles R.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.04.2017
Subjects
Citizenship
Civil Rights Legislation
Colonies & territories
Federal Government
Federal Legislation
Justice
Laws
Legislators
Malayo Polynesian Languages
Political geography
Political science
Samoan Americans
Symposium: “Disembodied Shades”: Teaching the Territories of the United States
The Teacher
Guam
United States > US
Puerto Rico
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Summary:All of the inhabited territories annexed before 1898 were governed as states-in-the-making and then admitted as states. Since 1898, however, none of the inhabited territories annexed by the United States has been granted statehood (Congressional Research Service 1985). [...]drawing on a generous reading of Rogers v. Bellei (1971)--which addressed the citizenship status of a child of a US citizen [or a US citizen's child] born in Italy--the CRS memorandum reasoned that because unincorporated territories were not in the United States, people born or naturalized in these locations could not claim constitutional citizenship and protection against unilateral expatriation. [...]whereas individual and collective naturalization laws confer a naturalized status on people born in a territory selectively deemed as foreign in a domestic sense, the legislative histories of the territorial jus soli citizenship laws unequivocally establish that the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the CNMI became a part of the United States--albeit for the sole purpose of conferring a native-or natural-born citizenship status on people born in these territories. [...]the prevailing statutory argument relies on a reading of the effects of naturalization laws (e.g., the Jones Act of 1917) and do not examine legislative history and intent or consider the language of the territorial-birthright-citizenship laws.
ISSN:1049-0965
1537-5935
DOI:10.1017/S1049096516003103