I am hearing for the first time about the Insular Cases, 100 year old legal statutes about the citizenship status of people born in the US territories. Apparently, the rules varied from one territory to another, but as it stands, American Samoans are “US nationals” not “US citizens.” Some American Samoans living in Denver sued to bring their home into line with other territories. The local court agreed with them, but the state court blocked it on appeal, saying that Congress, not the courts, makes that call.
SCOTUS declined to hear the case, though two justices, Sotomayer (no surprise) and Gorsuch (kind of a surprise) really thought the Insular Cases precedent got it wrong.
My question is, is there a compelling reason–palatable to modern citizens–to keep American Samoans relegated to this lesser citizenship status? Or is it legitimately something that only Congress gets to change? I feel like some details are being skipped here,
Generally speaking (possibly always) any time in the modern American system where certain people have fewer privileges than average, they also have fewer duties/requirements than average. For example:
However, neither citizens nor nationals of U.S. territories vote in Federal elections and pay Federal taxes.
Furthermore, the trend in geopolitical circles in recent decades has been for more and more self-determination, rather than having some far-off central authority impose a status on a group. According to this principle, if the Samoans are not happy with their current status, they can petition Congress–as the law-making body–to make changes.
If the Samoans don’t want to bother doing so, then why should some unelected group of people force change upon them?
Bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, surely? If they have no votes in federal elections, their petitions to the federal legislature are likely to carry less weight.
I heard a podcast a year or 3 ago about American Samoans and how they feel about citizenship. It seems most of them oppose the idea, as they’d have to follow the US constitution if they became citizens. As it stands now, they can discriminate against non-US samoans by only allowing property ownership for those of at least 50% samoan heritage. Some samoans expressed the desire to not become “another Hawaii”, and to control their own destiny.
There may have been other cited advantages about non-citizenship, but frankly I can’t recall them.