( CNN ) Emy Afalava is a loyal American and decorated veteran . He was born in American Samoa , a U.S. territory since 1900 . He has been subject to American law his whole life and thinks he should be a citizen . The Constitution would agree . The Fourteenth Amendment declares that `` All persons born ... in the United States , and subject to the jurisdiction thereof , are citizens of the United States . '' Yet , Afalava has been denied the right to vote because the federal government insists that he is no citizen . How can it be , in the 21st century , that Americans born on U.S. soil are denied the rights of citizenship ? That injustice clouds the recent celebration of the 115th anniversary of the decision of American Samoa to join the United States . It is a wrong that Afalava and other American Samoans are now seeking to right in a federal lawsuit before the D.C . Circuit . A decision could come any day . Since the United States was established , it adhered to the rule that those born on U.S. lands were U.S. citizens . The rule is colorblind , yet the only exception that the Supreme Court has ever declared was not . The infamous Dred Scott case legitimized slavery as it declared that free African-Americans had `` no rights that the white man was bound to respect . '' Though they were Americans , they were not citizens under the Constitution . A Civil War later , the 14th Amendment reversed the ruling in the Dred Scott case . Today , the Dred Scott case has come to be regarded as one of the worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court . But racial discrimination did n't end there . In 1904 , a Puerto Rican woman named Isabel Gonzalez sailed for New York . Because Puerto Rico was U.S. territory , she believed herself to be a U.S. citizen . But officials at Ellis Island labeled her an undesirable alien and prevented her from entering the mainland . She sued , with some reason to hope for a favorable ruling . Yet the Supreme Court that eventually heard Gonzalez 's case was still racist . In preceding years , for example , it had permitted a flat ban on naturalizing anyone of the Chinese race . And , in a case addressing the status of recently acquired island territories such as Puerto Rico , the justices had cited the alleged racial inferiority of tropical peoples as reason to treat these lands as second-class U.S. territories . Justice Edward Douglas White 's opinion stated that U.S. sovereignty extended over them , but that their residents did not hold the same constitutional rights as other Americans . He did so , he privately revealed , because `` he was much preoccupied by the danger of racial and social questions . '' In the Gonzalez case , the justices agreed unanimously that Puerto Ricans were not aliens and thus not subject to immigration laws . But they declined to decide whether or not Gonzalez was a citizen . Though preoccupied by fears that islanders were `` savages '' and racially unfit for citizenship , they were unwilling to violate the Constitution . As a result of the court ruling , federal officials were able to deny Gonzalez and others the full panoply of rights conferred on citizens for years . As Isabel Gonzalez 's lawyer told the Court , declaring that residents of America 's island territories are not U.S. citizens would mean adding to `` precedents in our history of which we are least proud . '' Those precedents , he warned the Court , had been `` repudiated by the American people in the Civil War , by three amendments to the Constitution of the United States , by this court , and by ... advancing civilization . '' Surely , 147 years after the Dred Scott case was overturned , the time has come to put an end to this farce . In the past century , the inhabitants of every other U.S. island territory have become citizens . Today , Emy Afalava and his fellow American Samoans are the last Americans still waiting to become citizens .
Emy ##ce is a loyal American and military veteran ; he 's also an arm Samoan . mark Erman and mark Perl - Rosenthal : It is outrageous that he and others like him are denied citizenship .