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Comment by mahaganapati | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately still we have Guam, Puerto Rico and others that have given so much but remain as not quite citizens

People in every US territory are citizens except in American Samoa. They’re not states in the same way as DC isn’t a state, but the people are citizens and enjoy freedom of movement within the US.

Statehood is a complicated issue. For example in Puerto Rico, there have were several referendums and statehood has never carried a majority.

> On November 6, 2012, eligible voters in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico were presented with two questions:

> (1) whether they agreed to continue with Puerto Rico's territorial status and (2) to indicate the political status they preferred from three possibilities: statehood, independence, or a sovereign nation in free association with the United States.[29] A full 970,910 (54.0%) voted "No" on the first question, expressing themselves against maintaining the current political status, and 828,077 (46.0%) voted "Yes", to maintain the current political status. Of those who answered on the second question 834,191 (61.2%) chose statehood, 454,768 (33.3%) chose free association, and 74,895 (5.5%) chose independence.[2]

The plurality, 46%, wanted to maintain the status quo. Less than 35% wanted statehood. And 20% wanted to move in the opposite direction: free association or independence.

There was a 2017 referendum which resulted in overwhelming support for statehood only because it was boycotted by the status quo party.

They are fully citizens, but where they live isn't a state.

Those born in American Samoa fit parent's comment. They're US nationals, but not citizens.

Only a few months ago, a district judge ruled that they should be citizens, but stayed his own order pending appeal. [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/us/american-samoa-us-citi...

This is interesting:

> The government of American Samoa has opposed automatic citizenship for its residents, arguing it would threaten the territory’s traditional cultural and religious practices.

I’m surprised the local government would prefer “non-citizen national” status.

There are reasons that places like American Samoa and Puerto Rico would not want to become full states- losing a certain degree of autonomy among them (of course, not all who live there feel this way).

Automatic full citizenship might be seen as a stepping stone down a slippery slope towards statehood, at least by those who prefer their current status.

The problem is that many of those "cultural and religious practices" would be unconstitutional if they were a fully incorporated territory. For example, only ethnic Samoans are currently allowed to own land.

And the residents of DC who despite being citizens are denied representation

It was a huge mistake to allow people to live inside DC in the first place. The National Capital that is part of no state shouldn't have anyone actually be a resident.

That particular mistake is too late to rectify now, unless someone is proposing to relocate 700,000 people. Hell, even just letting them vote as unofficial residents of the nearest state would solve the problem; Maryland can have those votes for federal office without having D.C. yield any of its own authority to enforce its borders.

Not really. Arlington VA was retroceded, no reason the rest (aside from actual federal buildings and facilities) couldn't be.

The biggest reason would be that the people of Maryland oppose retrocession. [1] You cannot make Maryland take back land they do not want without something like an amendment to the constitution.

Each year DC pays more federal taxes per capita than every other state. In raw dollars it is more than 22 other states. [2] The people of DC want representation to go along with that taxation.

[1] https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/..., Q22 on page 6.

[2] https://statehood.dc.gov/page/why-statehood-dc

I imagine it's possible, but "no reason" is definitely a stretch. The parts of DC that are federal land are hardly contiguous, and trying to force a clean split between DC and Maryland looks like it would be a nightmare: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/local/dc-marijuana-m...

you wouldn't have to be perfect. You could carve out just the contiguous core. I believe this was floated by Jeff Flake. Federal buildings can, in general, exist on state land.

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