Non-United States Citizen: Fill & Download for Free

You know, I’m really sick and tired of all this racist birtherism nonsense. People tried it first with Barack Obama and now they’re trying to do it again with Kamala Harris.The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution states:“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”Nearly all legal scholars agree that this statement grants automatic citizenship to all people born in United States territory, regardless of whether their parents are citizens. This principle is known as jus soli, which means “right of soil” in Latin.On 12 August 2020, however, Newsweek published an article written by the American constitutional law scholar John C. Eastman titled “Some Questions for Kamala Harris About Eligibility” in which he tries to argue that jus soli only applies to people who have at least one parent who was a United States citizen at the time of their birth. Based on this, he further argues that Kamala Harris is not a natural-born United States citizen because, even though she was born in Oakland, California, on 20 October 1964, neither of her parents were United States citizens at the time when she was born.Eastman’s argument holds that non-citizens living in the United States are not fully “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States government and that their children therefore cannot qualify for birthright citizenship. This is, of course, the utmost silliness, since non-citizens residing in the United States are subject to both federal and state laws, just like everyone else. I can’t see any legitimate sense in which resident non-citizens who are not diplomats and who do not possess diplomatic immunity are somehow not fully “subject to” the United States’ jurisdiction.Furthermore, even Eastman himself admits that the courts have consistently interpreted birthright citizenship as applying to all people born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ citizenship status, for at least the past half century. You would have to be insanely racist to renege decades of judicial precedent just to deny one black woman the right to run for vice president. At this point, I’m surprised Eastman isn’t trying to invoke the long-overturned Supreme Court ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford that black people can’t be citizens.Whatever you think of Kamala Harris, she is definitely constitutionally eligible to be vice president of the United States.ABOVE: Photograph of Kamala Harris

The United States has built a massive colonial empire. In fact, unlike most European colonial empires, the United States has managed to keep nearly all its colonial territories and it still has most of them, even today in 2019.First of all, even if the United States had no overseas territories whatsoever and was entirely composed of the forty-eight contiguous states of mainland North America, it would still be a colonial empire, since the white Americans who have historically ruled the United States came over as colonists from Europe. The United States has thus been a colonial empire since the very beginning; our country was literally founded from thirteen British colonies that rebelled against British rule.Furthermore, even though people of non-European descent now have legal rights, are legally citizens, and even play an active role in governing this country, the vast majority of people living in the continental United States are still descended at least primarily from people who originally came over from the Old World. Only a tiny portion of people living in the United States today are primarily descended from the actual native inhabitants of North America. In other words, we’re all colonists living on their land; the only reason we don’t call ourselves “colonists” anymore is because we massively outnumber the original inhabitants.Second of all, in addition to the forty-eight contiguous states, the United States also has numerous territories overseas. We all know about Alaska and Hawaii, which are states, but there are other overseas United States territories that you tend not to hear very much about.ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_insular_areas.svg) showing the United States and its territories around the globeThe most populous of all the United States’ current overseas territories is Puerto Rico, which is an island in the Caribbean. Puerto Rico has an estimated population of roughly 3,195,153 people. (For comparison, the state of Wyoming has a population of only around 577,737 people.) All Puerto Ricans are full United States citizens, but they do not have any voting representatives in Congress and they are not allowed to take part in United States presidential elections because they do not live in a state.Puerto Rico really should be a state because its people deserve full representation in Congress and the ability to take part in selecting their own president. Puerto Rico held a referendum in 2012 in which 78.19% of Puerto Ricans voted. In that referendum, 54% of voters voted that Puerto Rico should not maintain its present status. Of those who voted in favor of a status change for Puerto Rico, 61.2% voted that Puerto Rico should become a state.Unfortunately, only Congress can make Puerto Rico a state and, right now, Congress is controlled by Republicans who do not want to make Puerto Rico a state because they know it would almost certainly vote overwhelmingly Democrat.ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puerto_Rico_(orthographic_projection).svg) showing the location of Puerto Rico, the United States’ most populous territory.In addition to Puerto Rico, the United States also has other overseas territories, including Guam (which has an estimated population of roughly 162,742 people), the U.S. Virgin Islands (which had a population of 106,405 people at the time of the last census in 2010), American Samoa (which has an estimated population of roughly 55,689 people), and the Northern Mariana Islands (which have an estimated population of roughly 55,144 people).Believe it or not, the United States actually has fewer overseas territories today than it used to; the United States actually officially ruled the Philippines as a territory for nearly half a century from 1898 until 1946. The Philippines were invaded and occupied by Japan in 1941. The United States recaptured the Philippines from Japan later on in the war and granted the Philippines its independence in 1946.ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PHL_orthographic.svg) showing the location of the Philippines, which were officially a United States territory from 1898 until 1946Cuba was also occupied by the United States from 1898 until 1902. During that time, Cuba was ruled by a United States military government. In 1902, Cuba became a protectorate of the United States, thereby gaining nominal independence. Nonetheless, it remained very much under the United States’ thumb. The United States occupied Cuba again from 1906 until 1909.The United States is a colonial empire; it may be a democratic colonial empire, but it is a colonial empire nonetheless. In order to deny the existence of American imperialism, you would have to utterly warp the definition of the word “empire” beyond all recognition.

That study has been thoroughly debunked. The Washington Post, which published a short version of the original paper in a column written by the authors of the study, also published an article that showcased the major flaws in that paper.Researchers looked at the data and found errors in the questions, the methods, and the conclusions. They went back and re-surveyed 19,000 people from the original surveys and discovered that a high percentage, as much as 30%, changed their answers from one poll to the next, even when asked the same questions. Either they didn’t understand the questions as written, or were deliberately answering wrongly for reasons of their own.Further study, involving the demographics of the people who took the surveys, found that at least 130 United States citizens had identified as a non-citizen in either the first survey or the second or both.The survey sample had been specifically designed for an adult citizen population, so an anticipation of finding non-citizens in that sample was problematic.And because the sample was so carefully designed, even if the results could be believed, they cannot be applied to the United States population in general.Here a few articles covering the debunking of that study.Methodological challenges affect study of non-citizens’ votingTrump’s Claims About Illegal Votes Are Nonsense. I Debunked the Study He Cites as ‘Evidence.’