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After failing to overturn birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court, Republican legislators are turning to new tactics to disenfranchise people born on U.S. soil. Their latest targets are those born to noncitizen or permanent resident parents in U.S. territories like Puerto Rico, where the Supreme Court has said citizenship is granted by statute and full constitutional protections do not apply. The proposed “End Birthright Citizenship for the Territories Act” would create “a subclass of people who can be discriminated against” and “disregarded as human beings” in the U.S. territories, says Puerto Rican legal scholar Efrén Rivera Ramos, who joins Democracy Now! from Puerto Rico’s capital city, San Juan. While the bill’s sponsor, Republican Congressmember Morgan Griffith of Virginia, says he’s focused only on so-called birth tourism, Rivera Ramos says the language of the law is less clear.

The quasi-colonial status of Puerto Rico is also being highlighted by the 10th anniversary of PROMESA, the Obama-era legislation that created a U.S.-appointed fiscal control board to manage the island’s finances and restructure debt. In practice, PROMESA “has been a failure,” says Rivera Ramos, asserting the anti-democratic structure has imposed austerity measures and done little to address corruption, waste and inefficiency that plague the economy.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Last week, Virginia Republican Congressmember Morgan Griffith introduced the End Birthright Citizenship for the Territories Act, which would limit automatic citizenship in Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories to only children born to U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents starting in 2027. Congressman Griffith said in a press release his focus is on cracking down on, quote-unquote, “birth tourism,” and that while the Supreme Court affirmed last month that birthright citizenship is a constitutional right, it also, quote, “leaves the door open,” unquote, for congressional action on citizenship in the U.S. territories.

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His legal reasoning relies on the controversial early-20th-century cases known as the Insular Cases, in which the Supreme Court ruled the Constitution doesn’t fully apply to the territories, saying the, quote-unquote, “uncivilized” races who, quote-unquote, “infest” the territories are, quote-unquote, “unfit.”

In a press release, Griffith said, quote, “Just like Congress possesses the power to grant the territories Constitutional rights in........

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