Born American, Denied the Vote: How the US Created Second-Class Nationals
Guam residents hold US nationality, pay US taxes, and serve in the military—but cannot vote for president or elect congressional representatives.
When the US acquired Guam in 1898, roughly 20,000 Chamorro people became US nationals without consent through the Treaty of Paris. Unlike citizens, these 170,000 residents cannot vote for president, lack voting representation in Congress, and are taxed without voting representation—rights the Supreme Court confirmed they could be denied under the Insular Cases doctrine. This status persists because granting full citizenship would mean sharing political power, and mainland politicians have little incentive to change it.
On August 12, 1898, a small American naval force accepted the surrender of Spanish garrison on the island of Guam. A flag was raised in Hagåtña. A treaty was signed in Paris that December. And roughly 20,000 Chamorro people, who had been Spanish nationals for nearly 400 years, became something new: US nationals. Nobody asked them. This is where the story of American nationality begins — not with a revolution or a vote, but with a treaty signed by powers that did not include the people it affected. The Treaty of Paris ended the Spanish-American War, and Guam changed hands along with Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Self-determination, the principle the US would later invoke to justify interventions elsewhere, was not extended to its own new possessions. Here is the legal consequence that most people find surprising: a US national is not a US citizen. Residents of Guam hold American nationality — they carry US passports, they swear allegiance to the United States, they can be drafted into the military and fight in American wars — but they cannot vote for president and have no voting representative in Congress. Their taxes fund the federal government. Their sons and daughters serve in the US military. They cannot cast a ballot for the person who appoints the judges who decide their cases. The distinction matters because it reveals what citizenship actually is. Most people assume citizenship is a status you earn by being born somewhere or naturalizing through a process. But citizenship is a legal designation, and governments decide who gets it. A national, under American law, belongs to the country without governing it. That is not a quirk of history — it is the design. The Supreme Court confirmed in the Insular Cases of the early 1900s that the Constitution did not automatically follow the flag, that territories could be held without granting full rights. That reasoning has never been fully overturned. Consider what this means in practice. A person born in Guam pays federal income tax, is subject to the draft, can travel freely on a US passport, and is protected by US military presence. But when Americans on the mainland elect a president, that person is not their president in any meaningful sense — they have no Electoral College votes. When Congress votes on matters that affect their daily lives, the representative sitting in that chamber does not answer to them. They are bound by laws they had no voice in making. This status affects roughly 170,000 people today, and it persists because it is politically convenient. Ending it would mean granting two Senate seats and a House seat to a territory with a small population — something mainland politicians have little incentive to support. The people of Guam have pushed for change through referendums and petitions. The issue rarely generates sustained attention in Washington. The underlying principle is straightforward: the boundaries of citizenship are set by power, not by consent. The people of Guam are not Americans because they chose to be. They are nationals because a treaty made them so, and because the federal government has never found it necessary to change that. That is not a reflection of who they are. It is a reflection of who holds the pen.