Citizens of Puerto Rico.

The Congress of the United States passed and President McKinley signed the Foraker Act on April 2, 1900. It provided that all native born inhabitants of Puerto Rico were to be “citizens of Puerto Rico” with all the protections of the United States. And, for clarity, it should be stressed that the phrase citizens of Puerto Rico was used in the same sense as found in Section 2, Article 4, of the Constitution: The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. Furthermore, the Congress was apparently contemplating the eventual concession of United States citizenship to the people of Puerto Rico; that is, Congress drew from the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, Section 1: All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United states and of the State wherein they reside. Thus, what Congress meant to say was that Americans are not just citizens of the United States as they are also citizens of the State (which makes Puerto Rico similar to a State in this particular situation) where they reside. Simply put, the United States did not provide under the Foraker Act a Puerto Rican nationality for the people of Puerto Rico. And, the Act also promulgated that all federal laws of the United States were to be applied to the island’s residents. Of course, the applicability of all federal laws to the islanders who did not have United States citizenship appeared somewhat awkward as they did not enjoy of all the rights and privileges of American citizenship. Obviously, by depriving the people of Puerto Rico of nationhood, the Congress was denying the people of Puerto Rico a basic protection incorporated under the Eight Amendment, and giving them a punishment more primitive than torture.