American Samoa's Government: "Don't Let Our People Be U.S. Citizens"

Though there are strong indications that many alien residents of the Mainland, (legal and illegal) want to become U.S. citizens, there is a small, native-born, legally present population who should be denied that citizenship, according to their own elected leaders.

You read that right. The politicians, in this narrow case, do not want their fellows to become American citizens!

The deniers include the democratically elected territorial government of American Samoa and the brand new congressional delegate from that place, Amata Radewagen.

They have filed papers in federal court opposing the concept that residents of American Samoa, America's only territory on the other side of the Equator, change their odd status from that of U.S. nationals, to that of U.S. citizens. The territorial government agrees with the federal government on this matter.

I disagree with the Samoan establishment on this one, but its position is more or less rational — if just about totally hidden. In fact, when you come right down to it, the Samoan establishment's position on this citizenship/migration question is quite comparable to that of other power groups' stands on similar issues.

For example, the Mainland's economic establishment (the Chamber of Commerce and Silicon Valley) says that it is totally convinced — despite strong evidence to the contrary — that there is a shortage of American high-tech graduates available for jobs in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. Those business forces may not be able to acknowledge reality when they see it, but they are being coldly rational — more foreign high-tech workers are needed to drive down wages; it is that simple. So while the business establishment's immigration posture on this issue defies the facts, it is totally rational from its point of view, and its motivation is almost hidden from view.

Similarly largely hidden, and similarly rational, is the century-old posture of the Democratic Party — from Tammany Hall days of old to the Obama administration — calling for easy migration and naturalization rules so that there will be more Democrat voters. The current administration's posture on this is a long-term one as there will have to be many steps beyond DACA or DAPA status before citizenship becomes part of the picture, but that certainly is part of the plan. DACA and DAPA being the older and the newer, respectively, of the president's executive amnesty plans.

So both Silicon Valley, which wants more H-1Bs right now, and the White House, which is looking ahead a generation or so for more voter support, want the rules shaped to maintain their power, though neither is talking about it in those terms.

This brings us back to one of the most obscure power blocs under the U.S. flag, which is using its highly specialized muscle in this case — the tribal chiefs of American Samoa. They, like Silicon Valley and the White House, want to retain their current powers.

How does this relate to the issue of suggested U.S. citizenship for the people born in American Samoa to Samoan parents?

The relationships between each of America's various off-shore islands and Washington were arranged one at a time and are not uniform. (I worked for a couple of years at the Department of Interior's Office of Insular Affairs, the tiny unit of the federal government that relates to the islands.)

In the case of American Samoa — a coaling station for Navy ships that we were hot for 115 years ago — we agreed with the tribal chiefs at the time that were they to accede to American control, which they did; we would preserve their traditional "Matai" system of governance and communal land ownership by hereditary chiefs. Condensing various arrangements made over time, this ultimately led to the local governor and the lower house of the territorial legislature being elected by popular vote, but with the equally powerful upper house being elected by chiefs only.

The description of the tribal chiefs' role in the American Samoa election law is both wonderful in its own way, and unique in American government. The Senate is to be elected "in the traditional manner", it says. Everyone in the islands knows what this means, but I doubt that it is spelled out anywhere.

What happens is this:

There are hundreds or perhaps low thousands of the matai. They are adult, often older males, with maybe an odd woman or two in one or two villages. You cannot climb a ladder to get to be a matai — you are only born into this condition; maybe you can move up inside this structure, perhaps as a result of deaths of others, but you cannot pierce the circle from the outside.

Some of them are high chiefs and some of them are "talking chiefs". They are distinctly not equal with one another. I think that there are cultural powers or traditions that go with matai status, over and above their political powers. It is all very deep-seated. All carved in very old stone.

There are 18 seats in the Samoan Senate; one district or county has three senators, three districts have two members each, and nine districts have one each. The election process involves no ballots. The village matais gather in a single room. The least of them, prestige-wise, speaks first, then the rest, in ascending order of prestige speak (presumably about the candidates, if there is more than one), and then the senior chief of the district declares who will be the next senator or senators. And that's that!

The whole process in American Samoa makes the UK's House of Lords (which is largely appointive, but does include 90 hereditaries elected by the other hereditaries and two other nobles chosen in another way) look like a New England town meeting.

Those seeking citizenship, rather than national status for the Samoans, would apparently endanger the matai rule of the Territorial Senate. The incumbent senators, and their allies in the territorial government and their one largely voteless member of the U.S. House of Representatives want to preserve at least some of the powers of the tribal chiefs, and so they oppose the lawsuit filed on behalf of citizenship. (Territorial delegates can vote in House Committees, and in caucuses, but not on the floor of the House.)

A group of individual American Samoans have sued the federal government for citizenship, citing their interpretation of the Constitution; they have been opposed by both the federal and the territorial governments, who read the Constitution differently. The plaintiffs have lost at the trial-court level in the U.S. District of Columbia's Federal District Court, which is the trial court (oddly enough) for American Samoa. The case is now before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Their case is on behalf of those born into national status in the islands; a national giving birth on the Mainland produces a little U.S. citizen, and that status is not at issue. A national, after living on Mainland for three or five years, depending on marital status, paying a fee, and passing a test, can move to full U.S. citizen status, but according to the 2012 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics (Table 21) this happened only 891 times that year.

My argument would be based on fairness and neatness, rather than on legal issues. We need to look at the numbers. There are something like 284 million citizens of the United States; there are about 235,000 Americans who are of Samoan birth or descent.

Within the 235,000 population of Samoan birth or descent there is an unknown division of citizens and nationals. Most of the 55,000 living in the territory are nationals; most of the 180,000 Samoans living on the Mainland (notably California and Hawaii) are probably citizens, with a total national population not exceeding, say, 135,000.

So, the nationals consist of less than 0.05 percent of our citizen plus national population, and U.S. citizens constitute the remaining 99.95 percent of the total.

Why keep that tiny fraction of our native-born in a special, slightly less favorable category of citizenship? The nationals can't vote on the Mainland, and some of them can't carry guns (a non-problem to me) and sometimes they claim extra barriers to government employment (which sounds strange to me). Just because we were jockeying with Kaiser Bill all those years ago to get coaling stations (he got the better one, in Apia, capital of what used to be called Western Samoa), should we still continue this silly national/citizen distinction? I don't think so. If the courts do not change it, Congress can and should.

The otherwise commendable reporting of Law360 on this matter does not mention the special interests of the tribal chiefs.

My best (non-lawyerly) guess is that the chiefs will win the court case in the end. The establishment usually does.