American Empire: Overview (US Territorial Claims Explained)

The United States, obviously, consists of 50 states that are united, but if you dig slightly deeper, you can find that the U.S. has much more to it than just those states. In today’s episode, let’s take a brief overview of how the organization of the U.S. territorial empire works.

We’ll first take a look at the territorial division everyone is familiar with: the states. There are currently 50 of them, 48 of which are contiguous, plus Alaska and Hawaii. Based on federalism, all states have their own elected legislatures, constitutions, governors, and more, allowing state governments a large degree of autonomy. However, unlike other unions like the European Union, statehood is eternal, as declared by the Supreme Court in Texas v. White – despite Texas seceding from the Union in the Civil War, it actually has never “left” the United States, and also declared that states were not allowed to secede.

All citizens of a state are represented in Congress and all citizens living in a state have the right to vote for president. All citizens of a state are automatically citizens of the United States. Generally, things like national defense, foreign interaction, and so on are managed by the federal government, while states are responsible for things like law enforcement, transportation and infrastructure, education, healthcare, and so on are tasks left to the states. Hence, many of these vary from state to state.

The U.S. also consists of one federal district: Washington, D.C. Hemmed between Maryland and Virginia, the federal district is home to over 700,000 people, which is more than Vermont or Wyoming. Citizens living in the district have no Congressional representation. The sole member of the House from D.C. gets no voting power. However, people in the district do have to pay federal tax, leading to “taxation without representation” becoming the sentence written on all D.C. license plates. There has been a recent movement for D.C. statehood to ensure that citizens of D.C. get representation in Congress. Interestingly, though, Congress ratified the Twenty-third Amendment back in 1961, which allows citizens of the district Electoral Votes.

In addition, because it is not a state and has no “real” local government, it is basically at the whims of Congress. Congress has the power to overwrite laws in the district, and this has resulted in Republican lawmakers, for example, stopping abortion from being covered by state medical insurance in the district.

The next piece of the puzzle is U.S. territories. Currently, there are five inhabited U.S. territories: Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa. Except for those living in American Samoa (we will get to this later), all people that live in these territories are American citizens.

Despite over 3.6 million people living in these territories (with Puerto Rico contributing 91% of that figure), none of these Americans get any representation in Congress, nor are they able to vote for president. This results in a strange situation where an American from one of the states living abroad can vote (by mail) for president, but an American living in America (albeit in a territory) can’t. However, none of these citizens need to pay any federal tax, so there is that benefit.

All territories are unincorporated, meaning the Constitution doesn’t automatically apply there. The territories themselves can enact their own laws, but Congress has the power to override them. Except for American Samoa, all inhabited territories are organized.

American Samoa is an interesting case. The 55,000 people that live there are not considered U.S. citizens. Instead, they are U.S. nationals, with the only difference in that should they move to one of the states, they do not have the right to vote. To become a citizen, they have to go through the immigration process like all foreigners. This also means birthright citizenship does not apply here. The reason for this is because it is an unorganized territory, which brings us into our next category of U.S. territories.

All of America’s uninhabited island territories (except Palmyra Atoll) are unincorporated and unorganized. These are Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Jarvis Island, Navassa Island, Midway Atoll, Wake Island, Howland Island, Baker Island, and the aforementioned Palmyra Atoll. This means that (except on Palmyra Atoll), no one born here is a citizen and the Constitution doesn’t apply here. Palmyra Atoll, though, is an organized, unincorporated territory. This had to do with Hawaii becoming a state but not including Palmyra Atoll. As a result, any persons born here are technically U.S. citizens, although no one lives here.

American Indian reservations in the states are also a whole other story. A reservation is managed by a federally recognized Indian tribe, and as determined by the Supreme Court, most recently in McGirt v. Oklahoma, Indian reservations are not subject to a state’s laws and are not (officially) part of a state. Thus, they are free to make their own laws, so some reservations have made gambling legal in a state that bans gambling, for instance.

326 reservations exist on U.S. soil, comprising an area the size of Idaho. Over 1 million people live on these reservations. The largest of these is the Navajo Nation spanning parts of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, which is home to over 173,000 American Indians.

The last piece of the puzzle is the “freely associated states”: 3 Pacific island sovereign nations (Palau, Marshall Islands, and Micronesia), with which the U.S. has a compact. The U.S. provides national defense and other economic provisions to these countries, in exchange for land to build military bases. Citizens of these nations are also allowed to work, live, or study in the U.S. freely, without a visa, and vice versa.

Finally, we have American overseas military bases and U.S. embassies. Though not considered U.S. soil, they essentially function as if they were. Some large U.S. air force bases, like Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, houses some 54,000 soldiers and 5,400 U.S. civilian employees! The countries owning the land that these bases and embassies are on give the United States jurisdiction over the land, meaning that U.S. laws apply there.