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

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.