The legal argument that people born in American Samoa have a right to be recognized as U.S. citizens based on the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is separate and distinct from legal issues relating to the constitutionality of American Samoa’s communal land and title systems.

 In a 1980 decision, Craddick v. Territorial Registrar, federal judges sitting by designation on the High Court of American Samoa held that American Samoa’s land laws survived constitutional scrutiny based on “a compelling state interest in preserving the lands of American Samoa for Samoans and in preserving the Fa’a Samoa, or Samoan culture.” 1 Am Samoa 2d 11, 12 (1980), available here. Nowhere in the Court’s analysis did the issue of citizenship or non-citizen national status come into consideration. 

 Federal courts have upheld similar laws in the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, where people are recognized as U.S. citizens at birth.

 To the extent there are any unresolved questions about the constitutionality of land ownership restrictions in U.S. territories, these questions are separate from whether people born in American Samoa have a constitutional right to U.S. citizenship. Defending these laws on the basis that they serve as a compelling interest, as the High Court did in Craddick, is a better approach than doing so on the basis that American Samoans are not recognized as full U.S. citizens, which no court has ever relied on to defend laws protecting land and culture in American Samoa or other U.S. territories.