Guam Still Wants to Be a Partner, Not a Possession

The elemental human desire for self-government knows no geographical or racial boundaries. It burns as deeply in the heart of a Chinese student who stares down a tank column as it did in Thomas Jefferson and those who pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor in Philadelphia 213 years ago.

It burns deeply, too, in the hearts of the people of Guam, who have petitioned the federal government to end nearly a century of governance as a U.S. territory in favor of commonwealth status. This would bring us a greater degree of self-government and a new, strengthened relationship with the United States.

We have requested a change in our status repeatedly in the 91 years since Guam was ceded to the United States in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. Consistent with its previous responses, the federal government again seems to be in no rush to comply with the request.

As a result, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of promoting democracy in China and Poland while declining to take seriously the petitions of the people of Guam--U.S. citizens who have made enormous sacrifices, in war and peace, for the freedoms we celebrated Tuesday.

In the 31 months that Guam was occupied by Japanese troops during World War II, 8% of Guam’s indigenous Chamorro community died; an equivalent loss in the continental United States would have been 10.5 million casualties. During the Vietnam War, Guam sustained a higher per-capita rate of men killed in action than any other U.S. community or minority group. And today, Guam has one of the top five military enlistment rates of any community in the nation.

It is a bitter irony that although we have fought and died for the Constitution, our citizenship and the rights that we enjoy are not guaranteed by that Constitution. They are bestowed, and circumscribed, by Congress. As an unincorporated territory, we are the subjects of Congress, and what Congress unilaterally grants it can unilaterally take away.

Congress could strip the Guamanian people of their citizenship, disband our Legislature or even sell the island to a foreign nation. I do not believe that it would ever choose to do such things, but the mere fact that it retains this sort of power over the people of Guam is unfair, unjust and unacceptable.

Almost 90 years ago, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote: “The idea that this country may acquire territories anywhere on the Earth, by conquest or treaty, and hold them as mere colonies or provinces--the people inhabiting them only to enjoy such rights as Congress chooses to accord them--is wholly inconsistent with the spirit and genius, as well as with the words, of the Constitution.”

We do not need to dwell on hypothetical injustices, because the actual problems are harmful enough. Throughout our history, we have been treated inconsistently, like a foreign entity in some cases, a domestic entity in others.

Although it is 6,000 miles from Guam to California, our ports are considered domestic and fall under the “coastal U.S. shipping” provisions of federal law. As a result, the cost of a container shipment from Oakland to Guam is several times greater than the cost of the same shipment on the same vessel from Oakland to Hong Kong, a considerably longer trip. Yet the goods carried to the United States from Guam on those U.S.-registered vessels cannot enter the mainland freely, but are instead subject to tariffs and duties similar to those applied to foreign products.

Even though a glance at any map would reveal our unique transportation needs, Washington decides what airlines may or may not land in Guam; we cannot negotiate our own air routes with Asian nations far closer to our shore. But when it comes to certain Social Security benefits for the poor and handicapped people of Guam, we are no longer part of the United States, and our people must do without the benefits provided to other American citizens.

We want to eliminate those federal constraints that make it difficult for American business people on Guam to trade with their own country. We want to end the arbitrary action that destroyed a burgeoning watch industry in the 1970s and is limiting expansion of the textile industry today. And we would like to design tax laws appropriate for an island that must compete in the Asian marketplace for investment.

Governments, Jefferson wrote, derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The people of Guam love the United States and respect what it stands for too much to consent to the kind of treatment we are accorded today.

We know that we cannot become a state at this time, but we no longer want to be a colony. The people of Guam have voted to support commonwealth status four times. We want a relationship based on partnership, not possession. We hope that the attainment of commonwealth status will represent a declaration of interdependence between our small island and the United States, which rightly counts on us as a strategic bastion of democracy in the Pacific Rim.