In the 1770s, American colonists rebelled against the British because they were being taxed without representation. After the Civil War, Abolitionists crafted the Equal Protection Clause because the Constitution was not being applied to all Americans equally. In the 1960s, young people pushed for the 26th Amendment, which set the voting age at 18, because they were being drafted to fight in Vietnam but could not vote for their commander-in-chief.
Today, residents of the United States’ largely forgotten territories pay taxes despite having only non-voting delegates in Congress. The Constitution, and all of the rights enumerated in it, do not automatically extend to the people of the territories. They serve and die in Iraq and Afghanistan, but cannot vote for the president who sends them there. The hard-fought battles that extended suffrage and political power to previously unrepresented groups in the United States have not touched people in the territories simply because of where they live.
“No American community would accept being required to follow federal laws without any form of democratic accountability,” the president of the advocacy group Equally American, Neil Weare, told the HPR. “It wasn’t acceptable to Americans in 1776, and it shouldn’t be acceptable to Americans today.”
The United States currently administers five permanently inhabited territories: Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, and Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, colloquially known as CNMI, in the Pacific Ocean.
The territories in the Pacific are particularly affected by political and media structures that work against them. They lie thousands of miles off the West Coast and even further off of most Americans’ radar. This lack of representation has caused major issues that harm the daily lives of residents, but these issues are largely unknown to the American public. Improving this representation is key to alleviating those problems going forward.
Representation? ‘There Is None’
When asked what political representation the territories had, Weare replied, “There is none.”
Residents of the territories cannot cast a vote for president, though they can vote in the primaries. In Congress, each of the five territories is represented by a delegate who can participate in committees but cannot vote on the House floor.
This leads to seemingly paradoxical situations. “When I turned 18, I had to register for the Selective Service at the same time as not being able to vote for president,” Weare, who grew up in Guam, said. “This idea that I could be drafted to fight in the war, but had no say when it came to political representation, struck me as something that was antithetical to America’s democratic and constitutional principles.”
People living in the territories could be locked away for life or even given the death penalty by federal judges and prosecutors who are nominated by a president they cannot vote for, Weare added.
In addition, constitutional rights do not automatically extend to the territories, as decided by a series of Supreme Court cases beginning in 1901 collectively known as the Insular Cases. Even one of the United States’ most well-known rights is not equally applied; the cases extended birthright citizenship to the residents of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands, but not to American Samoa.
Forgotten by the Press
The territories’ lack of political clout feeds a vicious cycle in which territories are overlooked in the mainstream American media, which further detracts from their ability to push for important policy changes at the federal level. They are often treated as far-off, foreign places by the media, covered as international stories rather than domestic ones.
Anita Hofschneider, a reporter for the Honolulu Civil Beat who grew up in CNMI, told the HPR that she thinks the root of the issue is ignorance regarding the territories. “They don’t often appear in history books, maps, and the broad national discussions we’re having about policies,” she said.
But she does not believe this is an excuse for not covering the territories.
“What journalists choose to write is often a reflection of what we think society should value, and when we decide not to cover territories, we are implicitly saying that the stories of those people don’t matter,” Hofschneider said. “These territories are not just these happy paradises, they have a lot of complexity, there are things we can learn from them, and there are really important stories that need to be told.”
The disparity in media coverage means territory residents do not receive the same support for their issues that mainlanders do. Last year, Super Typhoon Yutu, the second strongest storm to ever hit a part of the United States, battered CNMI, damaging over 3,000 homes.
“There are thousands of people still living in tents, despite the heat, because there isn’t enough housing left,” she said. “With the coverage of Super Typhoon Yutu, a lot of the coverage that did occur was focused on the strength of the storm, but not so much on the experiences of people who went through the storm and who continue to struggle.”
Unequal Benefits
Even though the territories have some of the highest enrollment rates in federal welfare programs such as Medicaid, residents are not eligible to participate in all of the programs mainlanders can, according to a United States Government Accountability Office report published last year. In addition, residents of the territories, outside of CNMI, do not receive any Supplemental Security Income.
According to a report prepared by Weare’s organization, the territories currently receive $7.3 billion in federal benefits yearly. If that figure was proportionate to their population, however, they would receive over $17 billion per year.
A woman living in Guam recently sued the Social Security Administration for “categorical discrimination” in the distribution of SSI. Katrina Schaller and her twin sister Leslie, who lives in Pennsylvania, both have a genetic disorder that requires significant care and expense. Leslie receives SSI benefits to pay for her care, but Katrina cannot because she lives in Guam. It would be difficult for her to relocate, however, because her family and support system are in Guam.
Veterans who have served their country face a similar difficult decision: whether to move to receive health care or to stay with their families.
Residents of the territories volunteer for the military at higher rates than any other area of the United States, and that means they die at higher rates than residents of the rest of the country. Guam has a casualty rate for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan four times the national average.
Despite this, the territories receive disproportionately low veterans’ benefits, and receiving PTSD treatment requires going to Hawaii, meaning veterans have to leave their support systems and communities.
Harmful Regulations
The Jones Act stipulates that goods moved between U.S. ports, including the territories, must be shipped on American-owned and operated ships. Originally passed to stimulate the domestic shipping industry after World War I, Weare called it “another example where the territories weren’t really thought about in making the policy, but they bear the significant part of the burden.”
Even though Guam lies more than 7,000 miles from the mainland, imports and exports must travel on American ships, meaning goods cost significantly more there than they do on the mainland or even other island nations, Weare said.
“The people who benefit from [the Jones Act] are in relatively concentrated jurisdictions that have voting representation,” Weare explained.
More recently, a ban on cockfighting in the territories was included in the 2018 Farm Bill over the objections of the territorial delegates, but they were powerless to stop it.
The ban “upset a lot of people” in the territories, Tina Sablan, representative-elect for precinct 2 in the CNMI legislature and former communications director for CNMI’s congressional delegate Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan, told the HPR. “It was seen in many ways as an intrusion of federal law into the island without any real consultation with the people who live here.”
Another recent battle with the federal government, this time over gun control, also made CNMI residents feel the effects of lacking representation. Implemented before it fully became a territory, CNMI had one of the strictest gun laws in the nation, banning handguns and semi-automatic weapons. In 2014, a federal judge, appointed by a president CNMI residents could not vote for, struck down that law.
“People here were wanting to challenge that ruling and restore our gun restrictions,” Sablan said. In fact, the CNMI Legislature even re-passed the handgun ban in 2017, but it can only be enforced if the court case is overturned.
“There was a sense of federal overreach,” Sablan said. “That was an instance where you could see the tension between local and federal law, and to what extent self-governance is really meaningful here.”
Militarism and the Liberation Narrative
The Pacific territories have long hosted important bases for the U.S. military. While much attention has been paid to how these bases helped the United States to victory in World War II, the military presence has taken away land and resources from residents, particularly native peoples like the Chamorro of Guam, said James Viernes, outreach director for the University of Hawaii’s Center for Pacific Island Studies, in an interview with the HPR. Viernes is Chamorro himself.
Recently, as the Okinawa base in Japan is being downsized, a proposed plan would double the number of Marines stationed in Guam. The military already controls 28 percent of land there.
“Okinawa has long resisted the U.S. military presence. As that push has been moving forward, the answer the United States has come up with is to realign … that military presence to Guam,” Viernes said.
While Japan has the political clout to push out the U.S. military, the territories lack political representation, and the military has taken advantage of that, Viernes explained.
He said the military has also exploited a strong “liberation narrative that upholds the idea of American heroism, democracy, and patriotism” in the territories. During World War II, Guam was occupied by Japan for 32 months, during which native people were subjected to hunger, concentration camps, and sexual abuse until they were “‘liberated’” by U.S. Marines, Viernes said, emphasizing the quotation marks. At the heart of Chamorro culture is “reciprocity,” so he was raised to “give back to America.”
He believes that this element of culture has justified not only militarism but also the unequal political arrangement. “When you have that narrative bleeding through the culture, to call into question U.S. Congress’ plenary power and the lack of the constitutional applicability becomes very difficult to reconcile,” Viernes said.
Moving Forward
It is clear that solutions to many of the issues in the Pacific territories will require a change in political representation.
According to Weare, there are several different routes this can take. A territory can become a state, the course that most U.S. territories took in the 19th century. Alternatively, a constitutional amendment could grant the territories suffrage, as the 23rd Amendment did for Washington, D.C. Another option is independence, which would give the territories a “nation-to-nation relationship” with the United States, Weare said. They could then negotiate military and economic agreements with the United States, a path taken by the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau.
Daniel Immerwahr, associate professor of history at Northwestern University and author of How to Hide an Empire, a book about the history of U.S. territories, told the HPR that he does not see independence in the near future for the territories. Historically, he said, territories were only allowed to become independent when they posed an “economic challenge to the mainland.”
The independence of the Philippines during the Great Depression was “a way of chucking the Philippines over the tariff wall, so the mainland wouldn’t have to compete with Filipino goods or labor,” he said.
He said statehood might be more likely, especially for Puerto Rico, where 97 percent of residents voted for statehood in a non-binding 2017 referendum, though it had low turnout.
Immerwahr believes that the first step towards improving representation for the territories should be to let the people actually living there decide.
“People in the territories at no point have had a chance to vote on exactly what relationship they would like to have to the rest of the United States — independence, statehood, or somewhere in between,” he said. “All of this has been done to the people living in the territories rather than with them. For me that would be step one.”
Image Credit: Unsplash/Ricardo Dominguez