Comparative Regional Report on Citizenship Law: Oceania practice.18 A series of decisions of the United States Supreme Court, known as the ‘Insular cases’, held that the territories of the United States were not automatically part of the ‘United States’. Congress could incorporate territories by legislation, but their status did not have constitutional protection.19 One effect of the Insular cases was that the 14th Amendment to the United States’ Constitution, which provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States”, was understood to mean that persons born in a territory of the United States were not automatically citizens. Citizenship was granted to people in the Pacific territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands by legislation, but not to American Samoans, who hold the status of ‘non-citizen nationals’. In November 2019, however, the citizenship status of American Samoans was thrown open when the District Court for the State of Utah ruled that American Samoa was part of the United States for the purposes of the 14th Amendment, and as such persons born in American Samoa were United States citizens.20 Lesa v Attorney-General and the Insular cases illustrate how decolonisation is not a past event, but a continuing process. Citizenship laws are one of many sites for working through the legal and political effects of a colonial past, not only in newly independent or self-governing states, but also in the colonising state. In this, however, courts of the parent state focus on their own laws, and do not always have regard to the laws and policies of the states and territories that are affected by legal change. 21 Many in American Samoa have resisted United States citizenship, seeing it as a threat to uniquely Samoan institutions and customs.22 Others argue that a decision about the citizenship status of American Samoans should be made by – or at least in consultation with – the people of American Samoa. These examples highlight the interdependence of citizenship regimes, particularly in the context of decolonisation. 2.5 Influence on citizenship laws The citizenship laws of Oceania reflect this range of complex dynamics: the imperatives of Indigenous understandings of identity; historical and continuing movement of peoples; the need to unite a sometimes highly diverse population as a single nation; the desire to redress the racial and economic inequalities of colonialism; the exigencies of smallness and islandness; and the continuing process of decolonisation. The way in which each of these issues is manifest differs across the states of Oceania and some specific examples are discussed throughout this report. At a broad level, these issues inform some of the general features of the citizenship laws of Oceania. Across the region, the emphasis is on acquisition of citizenship by ius sanguinis rather than ius soli (see Part 3.1) and on naturalisation on the basis of descent rather than residence (see Part 3.2). As Castles points out, belonging by virtue of descent implies an 18 AH Angelo and Rosemary Gordon, ‘Citizenship: Some Pacific Realities’ (1991) 7 Queensland University of Technology Law Journal 127. 19 See generally, Rogers M Smith, ‘The Insular Cases, Differentiated Citizenship, and Territorial Statuses in the Twenty-First Century’ in Gerald L Neuman and Tomiko Brown-Nagin (eds), Reconsidering the Insular Cases: The Past and Future of the American Empire (Human Rights Program, Harvard Law School 2015). 20 Fitisemanu v United States (United States District Court for the District of Utah, 12 December 2019) 29-30. 21 Tagupa (n 15) 32. 22 Sean Morrison, ‘Foreign in a Domestic Sense: American Samoa and the Last US Nationals’ (2013) 41 Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 71. RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-Comp 2020/1 - © 2020 Author 5