Puerto Rico Should Have Been a State Since 1960s

Sure, the political will has to be there first though.

Haven't you read political history - in the U.S. and the rest of the world? It is a frequently documented phenomenon that "political will" can be coaxed to come out of nowhere in large quantities with the right leadership, situation, or context. It's not some resource that slowly builds up over glacial amounts of time, and then depletes quickly, like very early, old-school batteries.
 
Puerto Rico should be a province of Canada
 
Puerto Rico should be a province of Canada

Funny enough, Canada was tried several times to acquire both Bermuda and the Turks and Caicos Islands from the UK, and one Premier of Bermuda back around the Turn of the Millennium was all eagerly for it, too.
 
Yep, definitely had Canada's long linkages with the anglophone Caribbean in mind there!
 
Yep, definitely had Canada's long linkages with the anglophone Caribbean in mind there!

Canadian coffers kept the erstwhile West Indies Federation afloat for the duration of that four-year failed political experiment...
 
Such a shame, the West Indies anthem is the best

 
They aren't a state specifically because of one of the reasons you mentioned. They'd get electoral votes and house seats. Those had a hard cap placed on them so in order for Puerto Rico to get some they'd have to take away from other states. Where do they come from? States with high numbers like California and New York or states with low population that are technically "over represented" like Wyoming? Either option favors one party or another.
Um… didn't they reach a compromise already with the Washington, D.C. situation? Also Puerto Rico has nonvoting members of Congress so it's not as if they didn't send anybody (not that at least one of the two parties in the regime doesn't take them into account and considers them inherently inferior Latinos).
For those who haven't seen this. It's very enlightening

TIL the US actually has a defined legal category of the ‘US national’ that ranks below ‘US citizen’. I already knew about non-voting territories but this tiny piece of information had escaped me.
 
Actually, that's just in the modern day. In the 1930's to 1960's, when the Independence Movement was VERY strong, it was treated as a treasonous, seditious, and insurgent movement by the American Government, even though they hadn't started out with any violence or sabotage attempts, and tried to use legitimate political channels from the start like PIP does today.
Mexico is a totally independent nation adjacent to the United States and so many Mexicans have to climb over the border walls to enter the U.S. territory.

Puerto Rico should feel lucky that they are already part of U.S. I believe they won't want to be independent base on the recent world trends.
 
Mexico is a totally independent nation adjacent to the United States and so many Mexicans have to climb over the border walls to enter the U.S. territory.

Puerto Rico should feel lucky that they are already part of U.S. I believe they won't want to be independent base on the recent world trends.

I also live next door to the United States, on the other side, and have next to no desire to go there. I consider, in lifestyle and most other ways that matter to me, Canada to be superior of a nation to live in.
 
A hard cap is fine where I'm concerned. The number a congressmen represents is considerably different than it was. A consistent proportion would make congress so big it would be unmanageable.
It's 2019. If continent-spanning mega-corporations can exist with leadership structures numbering in the thousands and they function well enough to become dominate economic machines then I think the US Congress can handle being over 500 members. We have the technology.
I'm not against a hard cap but they do need to be re- aportioned more often to prevent some districts from having 30k people while others have over 70k population. Maybe if they worked like that there'd be less opposition to granting territories statehood.
With a hard cap and borders between the states, you will always wind up with a badly apportioned body over time. The only way you can even out the numbers is if house districts could cross state lines. You'd need Wyoming to share a house member with Idaho, for example. The other way to fix it is to grow the size of the body, i.e. have a bigger House.
Um… didn't they reach a compromise already with the Washington, D.C. situation? Also Puerto Rico has nonvoting members of Congress so it's not as if they didn't send anybody (not that at least one of the two parties in the regime doesn't take them into account and considers them inherently inferior Latinos).

TIL the US actually has a defined legal category of the ‘US national’ that ranks below ‘US citizen’. I already knew about non-voting territories but this tiny piece of information had escaped me.
DC gets EC votes but only a non-voting House representative and no Senate representation at all. (Pretty sure they don't have a non-voting Senator)
 
OK, so there's precedent for the electoral college already.

I think that part of the problem with incorporating Puerto Rico is that it would entail having to translate a lot of official legislation into Spanish, thus validating Spanish-speakers as human beings.
 
OK, so there's precedent for the electoral college already.

I think that part of the problem with incorporating Puerto Rico is that it would entail having to translate a lot of official legislation into Spanish, thus validating Spanish-speakers as human beings.

I still say make it an independent republic, and that would be long overdue.
 
Ah, but that would be treasonous. When has the US given up an occupied territory? When has any other empire, of its own benevolent will?
 
Ah, but that would be treasonous. When has the US given up an occupied territory? When has any other empire, of its own benevolent will?

The Philippines, Cuba, and the Selkirk Cession (a piece of what is now southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan the U.S. lost when the American-Canadian border was firmly set at the 49th Parallel).
 
The US only really left Cuba when it was kicked out; in the Philippines they'd had the sense to see they would be kicked out and decided to let them be ‘independent’. Not least, they first annihilated the Spanish language there in order to wrench the country away from the Hispanosphere and made the islands a US economic vassal (wiki says that by 1920 already 66% of its foreign trade was with the US, up from 13% in1895) so there was no need to occupy it militarily and give the communists nearby an excuse for ‘liberation’ -and the Japanese had been defeated, even if the 'Mericans were arresting people for being Communist even while at the same time battling the Japanese.



:(

Edit: also see this betrayal of the Philippines, the US Congress withdrawing veterans' benefits from Filipino combatants.
 
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It's 2019. If continent-spanning mega-corporations can exist with leadership structures numbering in the thousands and they function well enough to become dominate economic machines then I think the US Congress can handle being over 500 members. We have the technology.
I don't know about that. I'm part of a Global mega-corporation with thousands in the management ranks where almost all of them have no impact over the direction the company goes. That is still determined by a small hand full and spoon feed to the rest.
 
I don't know about that. I'm part of a Global mega-corporation with thousands in the management ranks where almost all of them have no impact over the direction the company goes. That is still determined by a small hand full and spoon feed to the rest.

In the U.S. House of Representative (or the British or Canadian House of Commons, or the French Chamber of Deputies, or the German Bundestag, etc. for that matter) very few individual members have much personal sway and influence in and of themselves. Party leadership members, the Speaker, and, occasionally, a few who have "pivotal" votes in a few contested votes that don't strictly follow party lines are the only ones with such enviable personal power in any case, to be honest. Most end up just party drone votes in most cases.
 
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