What Can America Learn from the Immigration Rules of American Samoa?
By David North on November 21, 2023
Although it is not generally recognized, there are two sets of immigration systems under the U.S. flag: the generally recognized Mainland program which has turned loosey-goosey in recent years and that covers 99.9 percent of us, and the American Samoa system which governs the remaining 0.1 percent. The latter arrangement is as tight as a drum.
American Samoa (population about 50,000), alone among our jurisdictions, has its own immigration laws and has since we acquired it in the days of William McKinley. Its people are U.S. nationals, not U.S. citizens. (The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, another U.S. territory in the Pacific, used to have its own system, but this ended during Bush II.)
The two systems are completely different from one another. In American Samoa there is no concept of legal immigration that converts an alien to a national (or a citizen.) There are no ceilings on immigration (as the Mainland has) because there is no immigration. There is no naturalization process. The three classes of the population are: U.S. nationals, temporary residents, and illegal aliens.
https://cis.org/North/What-Can-America-Learn-Immigration-American-Samoa
