When it comes to the rights and citizenship in the territories, things get a bit complicated. Puerto Rico’s official classification is “unincorporated territory” of the United States.

Infamously, the distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories rested on explicitly racist stereotypes about individuals from those territories. Opposing Filipino statehood ...

Ambiguity over the island’s status was fueled by Supreme Court cases [PDF] that declared it an unincorporated territory with no clear path to statehood. In the wake of World War II and a global ...

Samoa and the Marianas each have 50,000 or so. The U.S. also has unincorporated territories, which are largely uninhabited, in the Pacific and Atlantic, including some of World War II fame such as ...

This legislation is a win for all Puerto Ricans, regardless of how the island may ultimately vote, offering multiple paths to end its unincorporated territory status. Presented under the proposal ...

American Samoa is the only unincorporated territory of the United States where the inhabitants are not American citizens at birth. Instead, those born in the cluster of islands some 2,600 miles ...

Starting with the 1901 case Downes v. Bidwell, the justices distinguished between incorporated territories and unincorporated territories. In incorporated territories, like those on the American ...