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ABSTRACT
This article examines the legal history of the extension of United States citizenship to Puerto Rico between 1898 and 1940. During this period, Congress enacted a series of laws that extended three different types of citizenship to Puerto Rico, namely a Puerto Rican citizenship, a derivative form of parental or jus sanguinis citizenship, and a statutory form of jus soli or birthright citizenship. This article argues that law and policymakers developed the latter citizenship laws and policies in order to affirm the inclusive exclusion of Puerto Ricans within the nascent U.S. global empire. [Key Words: Puerto Rico, citizenship, jus soli, empire, imperialism, colonialism, Nationality Act of 1940]
the united states developed new territorial and citizenship policies to govern puerto rico and the other territories annexed following the spanish-american war of 1898. The new territorial policy ascribed an unincorporated territorial status on Puerto Rico enabling the U.S. administrative state apparatus to selectively determine when to treat the island as a foreign country for constitutional purposes. For more than a century, the U.S. has treated Puerto Rico as a foreign location for the purposes of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (U.S. Constitution, 14th Amend., cl. 1). Accordingly, some U.S. law and policymakers argue, birth in Puerto Rico is tantamount to birth outside of the U.S. But this view is contradicted by a series of laws enacted by Congress since 1898 which confer three different types of citizenships on the island-born residents of Puerto Rico, namely: 1) a Puerto Rican citizenship conferring a non-alien nationality (1900-present); 2) a naturalized citizenship conferring a parental or derivative form of jus sanguinis citizenship (1906-1940); 3) and a statutory form of jus soli or birthright citizenship (1941-present). However, while these citizenship laws have affirmed the inclusion of Puerto Ricans within the U.S. global empire, U.S. legal actors have consistently excluded Puerto Rican-born citizens from the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause, a precondition for constitutional equality.
Drawing on Ophir, Givoni, and Hanafi's (2009) concept of inclusive exclusion, I argue that the laws extending U.S. citizenship to Puerto Rico have consistently affirmed the inclusion of island-born Puerto Ricans within the U.S. global empire, while simultaneously excluding these citizens from the possibility of acquiring equal constitutional membership within the...