It's time to address the last vestiges of unequal citizenship

By Thomas W. Krise, Ph.D.

When we heard that a filmed version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical “Hamilton” was coming to TV, my wife and I thought that would be a perfect thing to watch on the Fourth of July. But, after two hours of struggle to get signed up for Disney+ so we could watch it, the customer service representative said, “Oh, I see now you’re in Guam! We don’t serve the territories.”

Now, residents in Guam and the other territories are used to this kind of treatment from fellow citizens on “the mainland,” but think about the special irony in this case: The film we wanted to watch was written, directed and performed by a Puerto Rican, and the subject of the program—Alexander Hamilton—was a Virgin Islander.

I don’t know whether Lin-Manuel Miranda knows about this exclusion of the territories from being able to watch his production, but my ears pricked up when I heard the language he used to describe his Puerto Rican heritage in an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air” this month.

He described “Hamilton” as an “immigrant narrative,” and he said of himself that he “grew up in an immigrant community.”

Terri Gross remarked, “I think for anybody who is a child or a grandchild of immigrants, there’s always this question of, like, how did they get the courage to leave, or were they forced to leave and then come to America?”

To which Miranda replied, “Yeah, and well, listen, my dad had it better than most; my dad came here on a scholarship; he was a prodigy; he had graduated from the University of Puerto Rico by the time he was 18 years old because he had skipped grades; and he got a scholarship to NYU … A part of me is always in awe of the immigrant experience; I’m a living testament and a beneficiary of my dad on my dad’s side and my grandparents on my mom’s side coming to this country and making a better life for themselves …”

The problem is: people from Puerto Rico and the other territories ARE Americans—they are NOT immigrants.

Now, that these two well-informed people—Terry Gross and Lin-Manuel Miranda—can carry on a fairly long conversation in which they make the people of the largest and most populous territory of the United States into foreigners without catching themselves tells us something about our collective colonial state of mind. If our most educated celebrities can overlook the inequality thrust upon those living in the territories fully controlled by the United States, how likely is it that the average citizen realizes they are tacitly endorsing the unequal status quo?

This reminds me of comedian John Oliver’s show in 2015 when Sonia Sotomayor was appointed to the Supreme Court. He showed video clips of multiple news anchors announcing that Sotomayor was “the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants” and “she’s a first-generation American; the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants.” John Oliver’s response: “No, she isn’t—she’s the daughter of Americans who moved from Puerto Rico!”

During our country’s long history of having both states and territories, did we say that citizens who moved from New Mexico or Tennessee or Oregon to New York or Pennsylvania were “immigrants”? If not, then what’s different with our remaining five territories? One thing they share that sets them apart is that they are all minority-majority populations. Together with D.C., they are the only minority-majority jurisdictions in the USA. The Virgin Islands is the only Black-majority jurisdiction; Puerto Rico is the only Hispanic-majority jurisdiction; and American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands are the only Asian-Pacific Islander and indigenous-majority jurisdictions.

As the Black Lives Matter movement encourages us to think harder about how we treat each other, it would behoove us to remember the persisting disenfranchisement, taxation without representation, and linguistic “othering” of our fellow Americans in D.C. and the five remaining territories.

Non-binding referendums and polls indicate that while some residents of the territories favor independence, most residents of all these non-state parts of the country favor closer integration with the United States, so solutions resulting in equal citizenship would have wide support. Statehood is the obvious solution for the larger jurisdictions of D.C. and Puerto Rico. For the smaller territories, the options range from statehood to some new status that extends voting rights and representation to Americans living there.

We’ve taken steps like this before, when we adopted the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution in 1961 to grant D.C. three electors for president as if D.C. were a state. The first step is to insist on equal citizenship and voting rights for all Americans, no matter where in the country they live.

It’s time to address the last vestiges of unequal citizenship and treat all Americans as equals striving for a more perfect Union.