Topic summary

U.S. citizens

Extracted from the Wikipedia article Citizenship of the United States.

Historic and current grants of non-citizen nationality

The federal government of the United States takes the position that unincorporated territories of the United States are not "in the United States" for purposes of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which grants U.S. citizenship at birth to people born in the United States. Hence, people born in an unincorporated territory of the United States are U.S. citizens at birth only if Congress has passed a citizenship statute for that territory; otherwise, they become non-citizen U.S. nationals at birth instead, as per 8 U.S.C. § 1408.