MORE INSULAR PERPLEXITIES.
By Editor
OUR peculiar insular policy continues to breed trouble and create new embarrassing situations. The latest comes through a United States Circuit Court decision which declares all native-born Porto Ricans to be aliens. This decision is based on the provision of the treaty of Paris, which expressly declares that the civil rights and political status of the native inhabitants of the territories coming into the possession of the United States through the agency of that instrument shall be determined by Congress. As Congress has taken no action on the political status of the Porto Ricans except to define in the act of April, 1900, the qualifications of voters in the island to participate in the election for the organization of the civil government, the court holds that they are excluded from American citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which restricts that privilege to persons born or naturalized in the United States. The decision has carried another fragment of the Constitution to all of our insular possessions, but it is unfortunately of a negative instead of an affirmative order. The natives born in these insular possessions, no matter what may be their color, race, educational, financial or intellectual character, are not citizens of the United States, altho the United States claims their allegiance. They are aliens, and if they wish to become citizens they must comply with all the formalities required of the subjects of foreign sovereignties. The situation thus created is in reality intensely ridiculous. But the whole operation of our insular policy is ridiculous. We have free trade to Porto Rico and our navigation laws extend to it; but neither is in effect in the Philippines or in Guam. All of our insular possessions have been brought under the operation of the general postal laws of the country. Still, all of them are foreign for some purposes and domestic for others. The postal laws extend to all. Now, their people are all foreigners and can not become citizens except through naturalization; must submit to the operation of the immigration laws as aliens; may be denied admission to the mainland territory as “undesirable aliens,” and yet, having no other government, they must submit to our sovereignty and their allegiance is due to the United States only. Verily our relations with these possessions are becoming more and more mixed and embarrassing.—San Francisco Chronicle.