Court Rejects Filipinos’ Bid for U.S. Citizenship

A federal appeals court Tuesday rejected a claim of U.S. citizenship by people born in the Philippines before the islands gained independence in 1946.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that natives of a U.S. territory do not meet the standard of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to “all persons born . . . in the United States.”

The suit, filed by seven Filipinos who faced deportation proceedings in Hawaii, potentially affects large numbers of middle-aged and elderly residents of the Philippines, said attorney Ronald Oldenberg. He said he would appeal the ruling.

Other federal courts have uniformly rejected claims of U.S. citizenship by natives of the Philippines during territorial status, from 1898, when the United States bought the islands from Spain after the Spanish-American War, to July 4, 1946. But Oldenberg said previous cases have not raised the same constitutional argument or attacked a series of Supreme Court rulings from early this century on application of the Constitution to territories.

Those decisions, known as the Insular Cases, found that constitutional guarantees applied in full only to territories that were singled out by Congress as destined for statehood.

The majority in Tuesday’s ruling, led by Judge Thomas Tang, interpreted one Insular Case in 1900 as concluding that the 14th Amendment did not apply to territories like the Philippines.

As a consequence, Tang said, natives of the territorial Philippines are not U.S. citizens.

Dissenting Judge Harry Pregerson disagreed with the majority’s reading of the case and also said its status as a precedent was weak.

“The Insular Cases are a product of their time, a time when even the Supreme Court based its decisions, in part, on fears of other races,” Pregerson said. He quoted the author of the 1900 ruling as saying racial differences were among the difficulties Congress must face in annexing different territories.