I’ve been wondering why we haven’t added any states since Hawaii in 1959. Did we just like a round number of 50? No one wanted to redesign the stars on the flag?
Why don’t Puerto Rico or Guam or the US Virgin Islands want to officially join the USA?
You can be fairly sure it wasn’t because it was a round number. Much more related to running out of contiguous territory. Having discontiguous parts of the country isn’t very convenient.
And of the remaining candidates, all but Puerto Rico are tiny in population (Puerto Rico would rank in the bottom half of the states with 3 some million). No one’s going to want to give Guam, with 170,000 residents, two Senators.
P.R. also poses the Quebec/bilingualism problem. And some want independence, etc.
Mostly the flag thing.
Doesn’t a territory/possession have to have a minimum population to be considered for statehood? I always assumed that was why the states get much larger as you go west…limited settler/pioneer population means larger land area to reach the minimum pop.
Totally false.
Contiguity is an important factor. Before Alaska and Hawaii there had been no admissions since 1912, the longest period without new states until 2007. Essentially the US ran out of territory that had been annexed with intent of expansion and where Anglo settlers had become the dominant political-economic group.
Populationally, Puerto Rico would rank about 26th of the states, with 3.9million – six Reps in the House, 8 Electoral Votes. There is AFAIK no current legal minimum-population requirement for statehood, other than a general notion that since you have a minimum one Congressman per state, it should not be too far below that of the averaged-out Congressional District (about 650,000 at this time)
Of all the nonstate jurisdictions, only in* TWO*, DC and PR are there strong pro-statehood movements. In DC’s case it gets no traction with the Congress for constitutional reasons and in PR it ebbs and flows and has never gotten the sort of consistent and large majority – just ocassional electoral pluralities – that would make Congress take note and do something about it.
I’m at work right now and must go, but if you wish I’ll come back later with links to the various prior threads on this subject matter, seeing as the OP is unable to do a Search Function for the subject.
There was a state admitted in 2007?
“I thought it was a nice round number.” – Cool Hand Luke
Stranger
No. The record for longest stretch without a new state being named was broken in 2007.
I think his meaning is that 2007 is the point where the old record for “number of years since new state” was surpassed.
1959 - 2007 is the year where the span of years becomes greater than the span of 1912 - 1959.
Because there aren’t any other territories with large populations of people who are culturally “American”. All of the states that entered the Union did so with large populations of immigrants from the other states. This is what differentiates Alaska and Hawaii from, say, Puerto Rico or the Phillipines or any of the the other populous territories of the US past and present.
Don’t forget that West Virginia was part of Virginia until the Civil War.
Also Dakota was going to be 1 state but they split it to form 2.
The US Army office of Heraldry has contingency designs for flags with 51-56 stars, and they look…pretty similar to the current one. So the flag problem seems to have been solved anyways. Also, we apparently need to give the army more to do.
There’s also a political reason why a new state wouldn’t be welcome: The addition of a new state means all the existing states have a wee bit less control in Congress.
There was talk that if Quebec became its own country the Canadian provinces east of there such as Nova Scotia , PEI, Newfoundland , etc. would join the US. Not sure how realistic that was, maybe it was pure speculation. It never seemed likely to me.
In the case of the Senate, as I mentioned, maybe more than a wee bit. I can readily imagine the Guamian and Samoan and Micronesian Senators horsetrading for huge subsidies in exchange for their vote in a closely-divided Senate. There’s already a fair amount of grumbling over Wyoming and Montana controlling 1/25 of the Senate and 1/600th of the population. The Senate was part of the checks-and-balances, big state/small state compromise, but don’t think the Framers envisioned states of such disparate size as Calif. v. Samoa.
The US does just fine having Alaska. I’m sure Canada could deal with being discontiguous easily enough.
The same thing was true 150 years ago. That didn’t stop them then.
No minimum. For practical reasons the existing states may not want to admit a place like Montana as 5 separate states because it would dilute their Senate representation.
51 Star Flagworks out just fine.
Guam and PR have the choice every election cycle to become a state. They seem happy in their current power structure.
Otherwise, we’re really just plum out of potential states.