How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  The Northern Marianas government and the garment manufacturers, it turned out, had hired a lobbyist to defend their lucrative arrangement. A really, really good lobbyist. He offered junkets to every Congress member and congressional aide who wanted to visit Saipan—more than 150 went.3 The visitors enjoyed golfing,4 luxurious hotels, snorkeling, and, in some cases, the services of prostitutes (some of the guest workers on Saipan were driven by poverty into sex work, others were forced into it outright).

  A private firm couldn’t have easily offered such all-expenses-paid trips to lawmakers. But, the lobbyist explained, “one of the grand constitutional loopholes we had used to our advantage for years was the provision that when a ‘government’ pays for travel—or,5 in fact, confers any gift or gratuity—representatives and staff are not required to report those expenses.”

  So, for the purposes of labor law, the Northern Marianas wasn’t part of the United States. For the purposes of trade, it was. And for the purposes of lobbying regulations, it was a foreign government.

  Nearly half the Republican members of the House Committee on Resources went to Saipan or sent staffers there. Tom DeLay, the House majority whip, visited the island with his wife, his daughter, and six aides. “You are a shining light,”6 he told local officials. “You represent everything that is good about what we’re trying to do in America, in leading the world in the free-market system.”

  Later, DeLay told The Washington Post that Saipan was “a perfect petri dish of capitalism.”7 “It’s like my Galapagos Island,” he boasted.

  For the lobbyist, this was a triumph. Despite the overwhelming opposition (two unanimous Senate votes), he’d arranged enough golf rounds and snorkeling trips to keep the loophole open for more than a decade. It was the first in a string of legally creative maneuvers that would turn him into Washington’s highest-paid lobbyist—“The Man Who Bought Washington,”8 Time called him—and a household name.

  That name? Jack Abramoff.

  For the top-earning lobbyist in Washington, Abramoff had an odd portfolio. He didn’t represent Fortune 500 companies. Instead, he worked the loopholes. His next victory after the Northern Marianas was for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who were fighting off a gaming tax. He used the same strategy as in Saipan, exploiting the fact that an Indian tribal government could give politicians unreported gifts. He took on more Indian tribes and nations as clients. He started representing a Puerto Rican business group. He organized junkets to the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and he got involved in Guam’s gubernatorial race.

  What Jack Abramoff had discovered in Saipan was the same thing the Bush administration lawyer John Yoo had discovered in Guantánamo Bay: empire is still around, and places with anomalous legal statuses can be extremely useful.

  *

  In 2005 an international treaty eliminated quotas on textile imports to the United States. Two years later, Congress finally extended federal minimum wage legislation to the Northern Marianas. The garment industry in Saipan collapsed, and manufacturers moved to China, Vietnam, and Cambodia.

  By that time, Jack Abramoff had been convicted of conspiracy, fraud, and tax evasion for his numerous shady dealings, most notably defrauding the Native American tribes that had hired him. His malfeasance filled a 373-page report authored by the incensed chairman of the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee, John McCain. Or, as Abramoff called him, “my hangman.”9

  Skewering the country’s most notorious lobbyist showed McCain in a flattering light. That, in turn, helped his presidential bid. In 2008, campaigning on his reputation for integrity, he won the Republican nomination.

  But McCain had his own empire problems. The son of a naval officer, McCain had been born not on the mainland, but in the Panama Canal Zone. He hadn’t lived there long, but his birthplace nevertheless raised questions. There’d never been a president born in a territory. Was McCain even eligible for the office?

  The Constitution requires that the president be a “natural born citizen,” yet it’s not clear what that means. At minimum, everyone agrees, it means the president must be a citizen from birth. But does “natural born” include those born in territories where citizenship is statutory rather than constitutional? The Supreme Court has never weighed in.

  The Republican presidential nominee in 1964, Barry Goldwater, had been born in the Territory of Arizona. He’d faced questions, but since he lost the election, the matter was never resolved. McCain’s case was more complicated. The Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” but the Insular Cases had established that this didn’t apply to unincorporated territories. At the time of McCain’s birth, there was a law granting citizenship (with exceptions) to children born to citizen parents “out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States,”10 but McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, a Guantánamo-like space under exclusive U.S. jurisdiction.

  In the 1930s, Congress addressed this issue. As a House report put it, “the citizenship of persons born in the Canal Zone of American parents,11 has never been defined either by the Constitution, treaty or congressional enactment.” After debate, Congress passed a statute making them citizens. It applied not only to future children but, retroactively, to anyone who’d been born in the Canal Zone to a citizen parent in the past. The law passed in 1937.

  John McCain was born in 1936.

  Had this been litigated, it would have made for fascinating case law. McCain was, per the 1937 statute, a citizen by virtue of his birth. But he wasn’t born a citizen, as no law made him a citizen at the time of his birth. Arguably, then, he was not a “natural born citizen” and thus not eligible for the presidency. As Gabriel Chin, the law professor who unearthed this, put it, McCain was born “eleven months and a hundred yards short of citizenship.”12

  *

  Gabriel Chin’s case against John McCain was never heard. Still, McCain’s Senate colleagues were nervous enough to pass a nonbinding resolution declaring him to be a natural born citizen. Yet it’s hard to imagine that this would have helped him in court. The Senate can’t stipulate an interpretation of the Constitution by resolution.

  Oddly, this wasn’t the end of McCain’s empire woes. For his running mate, he picked the governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. She was born in Idaho, but her family had moved to Alaska when she was a newborn. There, she met and married Todd Palin, an oil field worker of part Yup’ik ancestry. They had five children, all of whom are, by law, like their father, Alaska Natives.

  Palin made no secret of her Native ties.13 She drafted Todd’s grandmother, who used to work as a Yup’ik/English translator, to appear on-stage with her at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention during her gubernatorial campaign. Her mixed family, she argued, was an example for the state.

  Yet when she entered national politics as McCain’s running mate, one aspect of Todd’s background proved tricky. Not only was Todd Palin Yup’ik, he’d been, for seven years, a member of the Alaskan Independence Party.14 And Sarah had attended conventions with him.

  The Alaskan Independence Party rejected the legitimacy of the process by which Ernest Gruening had guided the territory to statehood. As the party’s chair argued, that process had been tainted because Alaska Natives who didn’t speak English couldn’t vote and military personnel stationed on Alaskan bases could. “Alaska was no different from other colonies,”15 she explained. “As Algerians did not see themselves as a part of France, or as Libyans did not see themselves as a part of Italy, most Alaskans did not see themselves as part of U.S.A.” The party sought a new referendum, possibly leading toward independence.

  Sarah Palin was supportive. “Your party plays an important role in our state’s politics,”16 she said in a video address to the party’s 2008 convention. “Good luck on a successful and inspiring convention. Keep up the good work.”

  *

  In the end, McCain and Palin weren’t much impeded by their colonial
entanglements. They were white, and they projected an image of being “American”—McCain a war hero from a military family, Palin a fierce defender of what she called “the real America.”

  The same immunity was not enjoyed by their opponent in the 2008 election, Barack Obama. On paper, Obama had fewer colonial liabilities than his opponents. He’d been born in Hawai‘i two years after it became a state, so there was no question as to his eligibility for the presidency—he didn’t have the McCain problem. And though Hawai‘i, like Alaska, has a formidable sovereignty movement, Obama had never engaged with it—he didn’t have the Palin problem, either. He spoke little of Hawai‘i while campaigning. Instead, he stressed his Kansan mother and his political education as a community organizer in Chicago.

  Still, Obama’s rivals smelled blood. His Hawaiian upbringing and time in Indonesia were a “very strong weakness,”17 argued Hillary Clinton’s senior strategist, Mark Penn. “His roots to basic American values and cultures are at best limited,” Penn wrote in a 2007 memo to Clinton. “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.” Penn suggested that Clinton, who was running against Obama for the Democratic nomination, emphasize her own status as a daughter of the land.

  “Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America,” Penn advised. “Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t.”

  Hillary Clinton didn’t take Penn’s advice. Two sources inside her campaign told a journalist that Penn’s memo caused a “near staff revolt” (another source claimed the memo was barely discussed).18 Nevertheless, Obama’s perceived foreignness rankled some in Clinton’s base. After Obama clinched the nomination, her supporters began to fantasize that he might be disqualified by the “natural born citizen” clause. They circulated an anonymous email claiming that he was born in Kenya.19

  Factually, there was nothing to support this. But culturally, it registered. Even when Obama’s campaign released his certification of live birth, even when a page from The Honolulu Advertiser announcing his birth was published on the web, the suspicions lingered. The documents must be forged, the “birthers” concluded. To them, a mixed-race man named Barack Hussein Obama born on a Pacific island just seemed foreign.

  Obama was admittedly unusual for the mainland. But he certainly wasn’t unusual for Hawai‘i, whose current congressional delegation includes a Samoan Hindu and a Japan-born Buddhist, but not a single WASP. Consider the last names of the other children whose births were announced in The Honolulu Advertiser on August 13, 1961:

  Arakawa, Asing, Ayau, Brown, Caberto, Chun, Clifford, Durkin, Earnest, Haas, Hatchie, Kamealoha, Kitson, Liu, Mokuani, Nagaishi, Raymond, Simpson, Staley, Takahashi, Waidelich, Walker, Wright, Wong

  Maybe a Simpson or Durkin from Hawai‘i could have run for president without a problem. But a Kamealoha? A Nagaishi? A Caberto? It’s likely that any of these would have stoked the same suspicions Obama did.

  Despite its origin among Clinton-supporting Democrats, the birther conspiracy theory hopped party lines in the general election. The Fox News host Sean Hannity picked up the issue, as did the CNN host Lou Dobbs. Seventeen Republicans in Congress either suggested that Obama wasn’t born in the United States or voiced a strategic uncertainty. (“I think there are questions.20 We’ll have to see” was a typical evasion, offered by Representative Charles Boustany of Louisiana.) Sarah Palin felt that “the public rightly is still making it an issue.”21 “I think it’s a fair question,” she added.

  In July 2009, half a year into Obama’s presidency, a poll found that 58 percent of Republicans either thought Obama wasn’t a natural born citizen or weren’t sure.22

  With time, the issue retreated from the headlines to the back rooms of the internet. But it returned in 2011, when the real-estate developer Donald Trump summoned it forth. “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” Trump asked on The View.23 “There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.”

  “There’s at least a good chance that Barack Hussein Obama has made mincemeat out of our great and cherished Constitution!” Trump wrote to The New York Times.24 If so, he reasoned, it was “the greatest ‘scam’ in the history of our country.”

  Trump had waded into political waters before. This, however, was a cannonball dive. He doggedly pursued the issue, claiming to have hired private investigators. He threatened to write a book about it.25 It garnered him headlines and served as the first step in his own bid for the presidency. Though suspicion of foreigners of all stripes propelled Trump to the White House, this was where it started. Without the public doubts concerning Obama’s “Americanness,” Trump would quite likely not have been elected.

  *

  You might see the intrusions of colonialism into recent politics as a sort of hangover—a price paid for yesterday’s excesses. In this view, empire is an affair of the past, even if its effects linger on.

  But empire is not yet past. In August 2017, North Korea, eager to demonstrate its destructive power but unable to reliably reach the U.S. mainland with its missiles, threatened to create “an enveloping fire”26 around Guam, which the United States uses as a launchpad to fly B-1 bombers over the Korean Peninsula. Yet again, it seemed that a territory might become a military sacrifice zone, and yet again the mainland press showed more concern for the fate of the troops stationed there than for the colony itself. “Guam is American soil,”27 its governor nervously reminded. “We are not just a military installation.”

  The next month, Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico, taking out the island’s power grid, water system, and communications. It also exposed the parlous state of affairs in the United States’ largest remaining colony. Although Luis Muñoz Marín’s strategy of using tax loopholes to draw mainland corporations to the island had dramatically improved Puerto Rico’s economy in the 1950s and for decades after, Congress removed those loopholes in the 1990s, triggering corporate flight, economic collapse, and an exodus of employable Puerto Ricans to the mainland. By the time Maria struck, more than 60 percent of the island’s remaining inhabitants were on Medicare or Medicaid.28 Because the federal government funds those programs less generously in Puerto Rico than on the mainland, the commonwealth found itself accruing unsustainable debt to pay its bills.

  The hurricane turned crisis into catastrophe. Puerto Ricans were knocked back a century as they made do without phones or electricity. Doctors were forced to perform surgeries by flashlight, city dwellers to search desperately for clean water. Hurricane Maria struck at nearly the same time as two other storms hit the mainland, Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma (which also struck the U.S. Virgin Islands) in Florida. The difference in response was palpable. Though Puerto Ricans were far more likely to die from storm damage,29 they saw fewer federal personnel, markedly less media coverage,30 and only a fraction of the charitable giving.31

  “Recognize that we Puerto Ricans are American citizens,”32 the island’s governor pleaded. Yet a poll taken after Maria found that only a slight majority of mainlanders (and only 37 percent of those under thirty) knew that fact.33

  There are about four million people living in the territories today, in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas. They’re subject to the whims of Congress and the president, but they can’t vote for either. More than fifty years after the Voting Rights Act, they remain disenfranchised. As Guamanians and Puerto Ricans have recently seen, this disenfranchisement carries potentially lethal consequences.

  Empire lives on, too, in the overseas bases that dot the globe. It’s easy to think of foreign policy as an affair of the negotiating table: sovereign nation-states sit down to threaten, bargain, or cooperate. But U.S. foreign policy, nearly uniquely, has a territorial component. Britain and France have some thirteen overseas bases between them, Russia has nine, and various other
countries have one—in all, there are probably thirty overseas bases owned by non-U.S. countries.34 The United States, by contrast, has roughly eight hundred, plus agreements granting it access to still other foreign sites. Dozens of countries host U.S. bases.35 Those that refuse are nevertheless surrounded by them. The Greater United States, in other words, is in everyone’s backyard.

  *

  So does all this mean the United States can be classified as an empire? That term is most often used as a pejorative, as an unfavorable character assessment. Empires are the bullies that bat weaker nations around. It’s not hard to argue that the United States is imperialist in that sense. Certainly its corporations and armed forces have spread themselves out comfortably all over the world.

  Yet empire is not only a pejorative. It’s also a way of describing a country that, for good or bad, has outposts and colonies. In this sense, empire is not about a country’s character, but its shape. And by this definition, the United States has indisputably been an empire and remains one today.

  Oddly, though the United States is frequently accused of imperialism, its territorial dimensions go largely unnoticed. So much energy has gone into presenting the United States via the logo map that even its critics, the ones most eager to cry empire, have little to say about overseas territory.

  Still, if there is one thing the history of the Greater United States tells us, it’s that such territory matters. And not only for the people who live in colonies or near bases. It matters for the whole country. World War II began, for the United States, in the territories. The war on terror started with a military base. The birth control pill, chemotherapy, plastic, Godzilla, the Beatles, Little House on the Prairie, Iran-Contra, the transistor radio, the name America itself—you can’t understand the histories of any of these without understanding territorial empire.