By your reasoning, I guess millions upon millions of Americans are British citizens, since we must have kept our British citizenship generation after generation even after becoming an independent nation? It’s bizarre to suggest that once a new country becomes independent all it’s people still retain the citizenship of the country they broke away from. When has that happened in history? That’s not even close to the norm. Your novel concept of citizenship negates the entire idea of independence.
This seems to be something you are very passionate about, but do you really think most conservatives want two more Democratic Senators, making it harder for us to keep the Senate, and more electoral votes for the Dems for president (Puerto Ricans here in the US usually vote 80% or more for the Dems after all)? Why make a left-leaning, mostly impoverished, Spanish-speaking Caribbean island a full-fledged American state?
The US should never have become an imperialist country, and we should have given a nation of people as different from ours as Puerto Rico its independence when we gave Cuba its freedom. We get no benefit from Puerto Rico, and we had no right to take it over permanently in the first place. We didn’t settle it and we didn’t really build it up; we only took it to participate in the European imperialist game of that era and it’s caused us needless problems.
“By your reasoning, I guess millions upon millions of Americans are British citizens, since we must have kept our British citizenship generation after generation even after becoming an independent nation?”
No one would reason that citizenship laws in England in 1776 are the same as the citizenship laws in the USA in 2017.
However, in the United States, people that are born in the United States are citizens and those born to US citizens overseas are US citizens.
“It’s bizarre to suggest that once a new country becomes independent all it’s people still retain the citizenship of the country they broke away from. When has that happened in history?:
The Philippines in 1946.
The Panama Canal Zone 1979.