Report from San Juan: New Bill Targets Citizenship Rights As Puerto Rico Marks 10 Years of PROMESA

Topics Guests - Efrén Rivera Ramosprofessor and former dean at the University of Puerto Rico School of Law. After failing to overturn birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court, Republican legislators are turning to new tactics to disenfranchise people born on U.S. soil. Their latest targets are those born to noncitizen or permanent resident parents in U.S. territories like Puerto Rico, where the Supreme Court has said citizenship is granted by statute and full constitutional protections do not apply. The proposed “End Birthright Citizenship for the Territories Act” would create “a subclass of people who can be discriminated against” and “disregarded as human beings” in the U.S. territories, says Puerto Rican legal scholar Efrén Rivera Ramos, who joins Democracy Now! from Puerto Rico’s capital city, San Juan. While the bill’s sponsor, Republican Congressmember Morgan Griffith of Virginia, says he’s focused only on so-called birth tourism, Rivera Ramos says the language of the law is less clear. The quasi-colonial status of Puerto Rico is also being highlighted by the 10th anniversary of PROMESA, the Obama-era legislation that created a U.S.-appointed fiscal control board to manage the island’s finances and restructure debt. In practice, PROMESA “has been a failure,” says Rivera Ramos, asserting the anti-democratic structure has imposed austerity measures and done little to address corruption, waste and inefficiency that plague the economy. Transcript AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Last week, Virginia Republican Congressmember Morgan Griffith introduced the End Birthright Citizenship for the Territories Act, which would limit automatic citizenship in Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories to only children born to U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents starting in 2027. Congressman Griffith said in a press release his focus is on cracking down on, quote-unquote, “birth tourism,” and that while the Supreme Court affirmed last month that birthright citizenship is a constitutional right, it also, quote, “leaves the door open,” unquote, for congressional action on citizenship in the U.S. territories. His legal reasoning relies on the controversial early-20th-century cases known as the Insular Cases, in which the Supreme Court ruled the Constitution doesn’t fully apply to the territories, saying the, quote-unquote, “uncivilized” races who, quote-unquote, “infest” the territories are, quote-unquote, “unfit.” In a press release, Griffith said, quote, “Just like Congress possesses the power to grant the territories Constitutional rights in statute, we have the power to take them away in statute.” The legislation would impact Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands. People born in American Samoa are already not classified as citizens. Vice President JD Vance has said on Fox News he’s in favor of the idea. This latest attempt to restrict rights in the U.S. territories coincides with the 10th anniversary of PROMESA, the law that established a fiscal control board in Puerto Rico to oversee finances on the island and restructure its debt, but its power and impact extends far beyond that. The law was passed in June 2016. For more, we turn now to two guests. Efrén Rivera Ramos joins us from San Juan. He’s a law professor, former dean at the University of Puerto Rico Law School and author of The Legal Construction of Identity: The Judicial and Social Legacy of American Colonialism in Puerto Rico. And we’re joined by Juan Carlos Dávila. He’s here with us in our New York studio, filmmaker, activist and journalist from Puerto Rico. His latest film for PBS is titled Farmers of the Sea, the third in a trilogy of films on the Puerto Rican working class. And we’re going to talk about that documentary in a minute. But first, Professor Efrén Rivera Ramos, if you can talk about this effort to strip citizenship, or birthright citizenship, for some in Puerto Rico? Explain what’s going on here. EFRÉN RIVERA RAMOS: Well, thank you very much. What I would like to say is that this is obviously an attempt to start tampering with the citizenship situation of the people of the territories. The title of the bill that has been presented is to end birthright citizenship in the territories. Now, that’s a very broad concept, and it could lead to other developments in the future that would affect — could affect the citizenship status of everybody in Puerto Rico, or everybody born in Puerto Rico or in the other territories. So, I would like to raise a flag about that possibility. The bill itself, if read generously, says that if the bill is passed, as of January 1st, 2027, children born of non-U.S. citizens and non-U.S. residents living in Puerto Rico would not be considered U.S. citizens anymore, as it is now. Now anybody born in Puerto Rico, regardless of the citizenship status of her parents, is considered a U.S. citizen. And that has been so since a combination of statutes passed by Congress starting 1917 and ending in 1941. The congressperson, Griffith, said in a statement that this would impact only the children of those who are living in Puerto Rico without being permanent residents or U.S. citizens. Now, if you read the bill, that is not what it says in the first part of the bill. That, if you read just the first part of the bill, it says that people born in Puerto Rico from 1941 to 2027 would be considered U.S. citizens, but not after that. It is not until the very last provision of the bill that it tries to clarify that this applies only to children born of non-U.S. citizens and non-U.S. residents. So, there is a degree of ambiguity in the way that the bill is constructed that may cause problems in the future. But even if it is interpreted the way that the congressman has said, it does create problems for substantial sectors of people living in Puerto Rico. We do have a substantial immigrant population. Most of it comes from the Dominican Republic, although we also have immigrants from Haiti and from other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. If the bill is passed, the effect would be to create a very special underclass of people living in Puerto Rico who will lose many of its rights, many of the rights that they may enjoy right now. This would be like creating a minority within a minority, in the sense that after the U.S. Supreme Court case Barbara v. Trump, children born of nonresidents and non-U.S. born in the United States, people born in the United States under those circumstances are still considered citizens. If the bill is passed, an exception will be made for those born under the same conditions in Puerto Rico and the territories. So, this is an attempt at creating a subclass of people who can be discriminated against even more and who could be — who could be simply disregarded as human beings with rights living within the jurisdiction of the United States, because the territories, after all, are placed under the jurisdiction of the United States. So, that would be my concern. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Professor Rivera Ramos, I wanted to ask you also about the PROMESA situation. It’s 10 years since Congress and President Obama set up PROMESA. It was supposed to be a temporary fiscal control board. And yet here we are, 10 years later, and it is still effectively running the affairs of the island of Puerto Rico, a U.S.-appointed board, effectively ending the claims of the United States that Puerto Rico was an autonomous territory. I’m wondering your sense of where PROMESA goes from here. Have the people of Puerto Rico become accustomed to having their decisions made by an appointed group of largely outsiders? EFRÉN RIVERA RAMOS: Well, I think that many people have become accustomed to that, although we can also witness, have witnessed, a growing criticism of the board. It is viewed by many people in Puerto Rico, with reason, as a colonial entity that was imposed by the U.S. Congress upon Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. As you have said, it is an unelected board that exercises a great deal of power over Puerto Rico. It has taken over many of the governmental operations of the Puerto Rican government, I mean. And it has made decisions that have had a very deleterious effect on Puerto Rico and on many sectors of Puerto Rico, especially the most vulnerable. The board has focused its operations on the fiscal end of the economy of Puerto Rico. And I think it is the consensus of most economists in Puerto Rico that that has been a huge mistake. Puerto Rico is in need of an economic development plan, of strengthening the provision of essential services to the population, of having a sound economic policy in place, of getting rid of many distortions of the economy, such as corruption, waste, incompetence, etc. And the board has done almost nothing regarding those very crucial aspects of the Puerto Rican economy. So, I think that some people might say that the board has had some positive effect in terms of the restructuring of the debt, but even that hasn’t been as important as it was needed to be done, and it has entirely disregarded the economic development aspects of the Puerto Rican economy. So, I think that in the end, it has been a failure. Media Options