Prominent legal scholars across the ideological spectrum agree that people born in American Samoa and other U.S. territories have a constitutional right to U.S. citizenship. Professor Michael Ramsey explained in a recent law review article that “the original meaning [of the Fourteenth Amendment] would apply the Citizenship Clause to persons born in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands—all of which are under permanent U.S. sovereignty pursuant to formal acquisitions and thus are ‘in the United States.’” 

A cross-ideological group of distinguished academics joined Professor Ramsey to argue in a legal brief filed before the U.S. Supreme Court that “the ‘non-citizen national’ designation imposed on American Samoans . . . is an unconstitutional exception to the principle of jus soli citizenship, invented by administrators and legislators operating under racist presuppositions during America’s territorial expansion at the turn of the twentieth century.”