In the early 1900s, the McKinley administration wanted to expand U.S. sovereignty over places like American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and Guam, but it did not want to recognize the people living in those places as U.S. citizens. The reason? Explicit racism towards the people living in those islands.

Breaking from longstanding precedent, the Department of War argued in 1900 that while people in these new territories owed “allegiance” to the United States, they had no right to U.S. citizenship. Motivated by racism, high-ranking U.S. military officials expressed concern that these new territories were “largely peopled by an alien race, ignorant of our laws, customs, and institutions, unable to distinguish the difference between the Constitution of the United States and a map of the country.” 

In 1901, the U.S. Department of Justice argued to the Supreme Court that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment simply “did not refer to” the people of island territories “who belonged to other races in other climes in the distant islands of the sea, uncivilized tribes in Sulu or Panay [in the Philippines, or], uncivilized tribes in Tutuila [American Samoa].” The United States, it explained, “never intended to make these tropical islands, with their savage and half-civilized … people, a part of the United States in the constitutional sense.” 

The Supreme Court echoed these racist sentiments. Justice Brown, who authored Plessy v. Ferguson (which upheld racial segregation) expressed concerns in Downes v. Bidwell, the most prominent of the Insular Cases, that acquisition of the new territories would mean that “children thereafter born, whether savages or civilized, are . . . entitled to all the rights, privileges and immunities of citizens.” Justice White worried that the acquisition of overseas territory “peopled with an uncivilized race, yet rich in soil, and valuable to the United States” would not be possible if annexation meant “the immediate bestowal of citizenship on those absolutely unfit to receive it.” 

Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Insular Cases avoided a clear answer on whether people born in island territories have a right to U.S. citizenship, in effect leaving the decision to the political branches. Acting on their own - without asking or seeking the views of the people in any territory – the State Department and other federal agencies began labeling people in American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands as so-called “non-citizen” U.S. nationals. It was not until 1940 that federal statute labeled people in American Samoa and Guam “nationals, but not citizens, of the United States at birth.” The Supreme Court has yet to either approve or reject this classification, leaving the question of citizenship in American Samoa uncertain.

Read more about all this in a legal brief filed by Right to Democracy in Trump v. Barbara on behalf of former elected officials and judges from American Samoa and other U.S. territories, and in this article written by Right to Democracy’s co-director Neil Weare in SCOTUSblog.