The 51st state? Why the US has stopped growing

This week marked the 65th anniversary of the last addition to the stars on the American flag as Hawaii became a state: has the "more perfect union" been achieved?

Starting the bidding at 13…

For most of its 248-year history, the United States was a restless, dynamic, expanding political entity. After the original 13 colonies had ratified their membership of the union, there were three more new states before 1800, another 18 before the Civil War and a further 11 before 1900. America was coming to terms with its ‘manifest destiny’, spreading westward across the continent. Yet today the most booming organism of modern Western history has ossified.

As Vice-President Kamala Harris was formally crowned as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in Chicago this week, the issue of statehood is suddenly back on the agenda. The mayor of the District of Columbia, Muriel Bowser, urged the newly anointed candidate to take up her district’s cause, and several other groups in Chicago saw an opportunity to raise the issue. Petula Dvorak, writing in The Washington Post, suggested that Harris, who attended Howard University in Washington, might be sympathetic. Meanwhile, Senator Mitch McConnell, the outgoing Senate minority leader, has warned that a Democratic landslide would see not just the District of Columbia but also Puerto Rico made into states, which he said would mean “four new Democratic senators in perpetuity”.

All done at 50?

It was 65 years ago this week that President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Proclamation 3309 which admitted Hawaii as the 50th, and currently newest, state of the Union. Alaska had become the 49th state at the beginning of 1959. That gap of 65 years (and counting) is unprecedented. The admission of Alaska and Hawaii marked the end of a 47-year drought since Arizona’s statehood in 1912; but before that, the United States had never gone more than 15 years without expanding. Now, however, unless there is a seismic change, Barack Obama—a Hawaii native, coincidentally—will become the first president of the United States in its history to be born and to die with the same number of stars on the flag.

There is no logical reason that the United States should be ‘complete’ at 50 or that the objective expressed in the preamble to the Constitution of forming “a more perfect Union” should have been achieved. The addition of Arizona offered a tenuous kind of geographical finality, as it was the last state of continental America between Canada and Mexico, but Alaska and Hawaii are non-contiguous and extended the Union beyond its natural borders. Alaska had been an organised incorporated territory since 1912, having been a military-controlled department then a civilian district since its purchase from the Russian Empire in 1867. Hawaii had been an organised incorporated territory from 1900, and briefly an unincorporated and unorganised territory from 1898 to 1900 after the United States annexed the independent Republic of Hawaii.

This evolution in legal status was quite normal for land absorbed by the United States. Arizona had been carved out of New Mexico and designated as a territory in 1863 before its admission as a state in 1912. New Mexico, previously the Spanish province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México, had been seized by the United States and placed under a provisional government in 1846, formally ceded under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and established as an organised incorporated territory in 1850 then granted statehood in 1912. Oklahoma, admitted as a state in 1907, had been formed from the Territory of Oklahoma and the unorganised Indian Territory. This sort of progression had been a standard part of the development of newly populated or acquired regions, with statehood as the final stage. Yet it has long since stopped.

What’s next?

There are several candidates for statehood. Excepting the 50 states of the Union, the US government also has jurisdiction over the District of Columbia (a federal district), Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and the North Mariana Islands (organised unincorporated territories) and American Samoa, an unincorporated unorganised territory. The District of Columbia has a unique status in the United States: as the location of the federal capital, it was deliberately not designated as part of any state when it was established by the Residence Act of 1790. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress “exclusive jurisdiction” over the district, and it had no elected local government until the Home Rule Act of 1973. It is represented in the House by a non-voting delegate (and not at all in the Senate), but is subject to all federal taxes.

Organised territories are those under federal sovereignty which have some measure of self-government through an organic act derived from Congress’s powers in Article IV, Section 3, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution Territories which are unincorporated, according to the United States Department of the Interior, are “area[s] in which the United States Congress has determined that only selected parts of the United States Constitution apply”. “Fundamental rights”, generally held to be the basic rights of any citizen in a free democracy, apply as a matter of law but full constitutional rights do not.

This means that residents of United States territories are not equal citizens: they cannot vote in presidential elections and they are represented in Congress only by non-voting delegates (although they are not subject to federal tax). In 2016, the Supreme Court ruled in Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle that territories are not sovereign, and in 2022’s United States v. Vaello-Madero that residents of those territories can be excluded from federal benefits. Those born in born in Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are US citizens by right of birth, but those born in American Samoa are entitled to US nationality but not necessarily citizenship, unless they have a parent who is a US citizen. Foreign nationals residing in the first four territories can apply for citizenship by naturalisation, while foreign nationals in American Samoa cannot apply for US citizenship or nationality at all. The United Nations list of “non-self-governing territories”, while dominated by Britain’s overseas territories, also includes the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Guam.

One might imagine that these territorial anomalies would move, as was historically the case, gradually towards becoming full states of the Union. The District of Columbia voted overwhelmingly for statehood in an advisory referendum in 2016, and legislation to admit DC has twice passed the US House of Representatives, in 2020 and 2021. Puerto Rico has voted in favour of becoming a state in 2012, 2017 and 2020, and another vote is promised at the November elections. Opinion polls in Guam indicate support for statehood, while there is significant backing in the North Mariana Islands for reunification with Guam as a pathway to being part of a state of the Union.

Admission of new states is, of course, at the discretion of the United States Congress. Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution, the so-called Admissions Clause, gives Congress “Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States”. That discretion is real: for a territory simply to express a desire to become a state is not enough for it to be admitted, because the United States is in some ways a club which rightly exercises discrimination over its membership, just as NATO or the European Union do.

Why have no ambitions for statehood been realised for an unprecedented 65 years? The main reason is everyday party politics. The District of Columbia regularly votes more than 85 per cent for the Democratic Party in congressional elections, so Republicans have no incentive to add those 670,000 voters to the federal total. Both of Puerto Rico’s main political parties, which win more than two-thirds of the vote, tend to align with the Democrats, while the current governor of Guam, a Democrat, beat her Republican challenger 55/45 at the last election. Not only would those voters join the federal electorate, of course, but any new state would be entitled, unless the Constitution were amended, to two United States Senators and to votes in the Electoral College according to their combined number of senators and representatives. In partisan terms. therefore, there is no advantage to the Republican Party in extending statehood to any of the immediately likely candidates. If, for example, DC, Puerto Rico and Guam were to be admitted, the Democratic Party would likely be gifted an additional six senators.

There are more principled arguments against statehood, even if they are not conclusive. Some territories have very small populations which, it has been suggested, are too small to be sustainable states: the US Virgin Islands has a population of only 87,146, American Samoa is 49,710 and the North Mariana Islands are less populous still, at 49,710. Even if, as some favour, the Mariana Islands and Guam were united, the resulting territory would only have a headcount of just over 200,000. The smallest state in the Union, Wyoming, currently has a population of 576,851, and it is one of only six states to number under a million.

This argument does not hold for Puerto Rico, with a population of 3,285,874, nor really for the District of Columbia, which, at 689,545, would rank above Wyoming and Vermont. If there is a debate over the size of states, especially the huge disparity between Wyoming, with 575,000 residents, and California at 39.5 million, then it is a wider discussion about the federal system and should not be used as a obstacle to aspirant new states.

It is also argued that the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico were never intended to be states. The United States Constitution gives Congress direct authority over the seat of the federal government, and for DC to become a state would therefore require a constitutional amendment as well as legislation. Puerto Rico, meanwhile, was seized by the United States during the Spanish-American War of 1898 in order to give America a stronger presence in the Caribbean and to give greater access to a potential canal across the isthmus of Panama. While the Foraker Act of 1900 replaced military rule with a civilian government, Puerto Rico was established as an unincorporated territory with limited rights. Even if we accept these arguments at face value, however, they are hardly compelling: intent can change over time (certainly in the nearly 250 years since the District of Columbia was established) and Congress is well within its rights to legislate to reflect such a change.

The legal mechanisms for admitting new states would have to be strictly observed and would be especially complicated for the District of Columbia: amending the United States Constitution is (quite rightly) a long and complex process which requires ratification by three-quarters of state legislatures, and there have only been 27 amendments in total, the last ratified in 1992. (There are still four amendments technically pending ratification, but the first was proposed in 1789 so one may read the runes.) But this is a question of due process, not an objection in principle. There is no sense that there cannot be new states admitted to the Union, only that it is not the work of a moment.

In terms of the most likely current candidates for statehood, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is a matter of party calculation: the additions would strengthen the power of the Democratic Party. That is an understandable argument but not one sufficient to counter the issue of rights and representation in DC and the territories. Moreover, it is not even an unprecedented situation: when the Territory of Dakota was admitted to the Union in 1889, it was split into two states, North and South Dakota, at the initiative of a Republican-dominated Congress because it was reliable Republican country and would therefore give the GOP four new senators rather than two. Party advantage has often been a calculation, or at least an acknowledged factor.

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There have been other more improbable proposals for new jurisdictions within the continental United States. As far back as 1858, there was a suggestion that Michigan’s Upper Peninsula could combine with parts of north-eastern Minnesota to create a state called Superior or Ontonagon. The idea was revived in 1897, and again in 1959 when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union. In 1962, an Upper Peninsula Independence Association was formed to campaign for a state of Superior, and a secession bill was introduced into the Michigan Legislature.

In 2013, there was a proposal to create a state of North Colorado, while in October 2014 the city of South Miami passed a resolution to divide Florida and establish a new state of South Florida. In 2019, similarly more out of frustration with local politics than as a genuine aspiration, Illinois Republicans devised a plan to divide Chicago from the rest of the state and make it a separate jurisdiction. The same year, Christian conservatives in Washington State began raising funds to establish a new state in eastern Washington, to be called Liberty; the plan then developed to call for the addition of parts of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. State Representative Matt Shea, a Republican, argued that the Washington State Legislature had been taken over by “atheists and communists”, and that Liberty would be an explicitly Christian jurisdiction. Last year, Republican Assemblyman Keith Brown of Long Island made a speech in the New York State Assembly calling for Long Island to be given statehood, arguing it had been “an ATM for New York City” and was wealthy enough to be a separate entity.

A number of plans have been proposed to carve up California, the most populous state in the Union. In 2016, the “Six Californias” Initiative proposed the rearrangement of the state into six smaller units: Central California, Jefferson, North California, Silicon Valley, South California and West California. It gained little widespread support. Two years later, the plan’s main backer, venture capitalist Tim Draper, put forward a new California Three States Initiative, which would create states of North California, California and South California. It was similarly unsuccessful.

These ideas are much more far-fetched than the campaigns for statehood for the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico and are not realistic prospects. They also fall into a different category, since they involve the division of existing states rather than the accession of existing jurisdictions. Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution, known as the New States Clause, stipulates that:

no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

Therefore they face an additional hurdle, that of the agreement of the state legislature(s) affected as well as the US Congress. They are, however, worth noting because they reinforce the notion that the status quo of 50 states is not regarded as immutable and there are many people who take a much more dynamic view of the institutional arrangement of the United States.

What about thinking bigger?

There is an argument for thinking about the United States as a broader conception. Two of the current states were independent entities before joining the Union: the State of Vermont was founded in January 1777, declaring its separation from the British provinces of Quebec, New Hampshire and New York, and enjoyed a semi-autonomous existence until being admitted to the United States in March 1791. Although it never gained diplomatic recognition internationally, it had its own constitution, issued coinage and currency and operated a postal service. It was headed by a governor (Thomas Chittenden 1778-89 and 1790-91, Moses Robinson 1789-90) from its capital in Windsor.

Likewise, the Republic of Texas was an independent state from March 1835 to December 1845. After an influx of immigrants from the United States who came to make up the majority of the population, Texas made a formal declaration of independence from the Mexican Republic and Sam Houston, a former US representative and governor of Tennessee, became the first president. Although Mexico did not formally recognise the new nation, Texas did gain diplomatic recognition from the United States as well as Belgium, France, the Netherlands, the Republic of Yucatán and the United Kingdom. (Its legation in London at 4 St James’s Street was above the wine merchants Berry Bros. and Rudd and is still marked with a brass plaque.)

The newly independent republic had applied to join the United States almost immediately after its secession from Mexico, a move generally supported by its American population, but President Andrew Jackson had deferred the issue because of the potentially disruptive effect on the balance between states which allowed slavery and those which did not, and his successor Martin van Buren refused a formal proposal. However, in 1845 the US Congress and the Texas Congress passed resolutions for annexing Texas and it was admitted as the 28th state on 29 December 1845.

There are, therefore, precedents for foreign states being absorbed into the Union. The Philippines were governed by the United States from 1898 to 1946, under a military government (1898-1902), as an unincorporated territory (1902-35) and as an unincorporated and organised commonwealth. The independent Republic of the Philippines was declared under the Treaty of Manila on 4 July 1946. However, in September 1971, Rufino Antonio, a former member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines, founded the Philippines Statehood USA movement advocating the country’s accession to the United States and claimed more than a million supporters. By March 1974, an opinion poll indicated that 60 per cent supported the policy. Undoubtedly a great deal of this support stemmed from dissatisfaction with the rule of President Ferdinand Marcos, especially the period of martial law after September 1982.

Nonetheless, there was another brief revival of the idea in 1981 when former congressman Bartolome Cabangbang revived the statehood movement and a political arm, the Federal Party; he argued that the country was so dependent on and influenced by the United States that it was merely a logical extension of the status quo. “We have been a paramour of America for years. Why don’t we legitimise the relationship and get married?” Cabangbang stood in the presidential election of June 1981 but won only 3.6 per cent of the vote, demonstrating that the idea of statehood had lost any attraction it might have had a decade before (although an online petition was created briefly and to little acclaim in 2014).

There has also been a fringe movement in favour of US statehood in Guyana, which was a British colony as British Guiana from 1831 to 1966, and in 2022 a right-wing group opposed to prime minister Justin Trudeau founded the Alberta 51 Project to campaign for the western Canadian province of Alberta to join the United States. According to a poll in February 2023, a fifth of Albertans supported the proposal.

These may be fringe proposals, often motivated by local political circumstances as much as a desire to be part of America’s more perfect Union. However, Dr Thomas P.M. Barnett, an eminent Harvard-educated geostrategist who worked at the United States Naval College and the Pentagon, had reframed the idea more positively in his most recent book, America’s New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse. In a chapter entitled “Get Busy Adding Stars or Get Busy Losing Them”, Barnett argues that the 65-year stasis, and the concentration of American political leadership on securing the borders of the United States and limiting immigration, have put America on a trajectory which is at odds with global trends.

Frozen at fifty states, America strategically retreats as other superpowers extend spheres of influence—and borders. We need to re-embrace growth, looking primarily south.

He notes that his forbears lived through the expansion of the Union as a matter of routine: his father experienced the admission of Alaska and Hawaii, his grandfather saw five new stars added to the American flag and his great-grandfather’s lifetime encompassed the accession of 13 new states.

When America’s Founding Fathers dreamed of the American System of political, economic, social, and territorial integration, they were not just contemplating our horizontal slice of North America. Visionaries like Alexander Hamilton and later Henry Clay (who coined the term) imagined that system extending itself to welcome all Americans.

It is unquestionably true—and Barnett would concede this freely—that expanding the United States, especially southwards to countries which are currently the source of much of the controversial illegal immigration causing so much anxiety, is not part of mainstream political discourse at the time being. But it is worth a moment to embrace Barnett’s reframing of the concept of the United States, even if only to benefit from an unfamiliar perspective.

After all, the world has not uniformly embraced nationalism and the insistence on maximal sovereignty. While the UK’s departure from the European Union in 2020 was the most obvious expression of a nation seeking greater freedom from a larger political bloc, there are currently nine countries which want to join the EU. One of Barnett’s arguments, which is persuasive, is that immigration is caused by a number of push and pull factors including increasing climate disruption due to extreme heat in countries near the equator, the consequent reduction in economic opportunities in those countries and therefore the attraction of better conditions in more prosperous nations like the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and others. Yet a Fortress America of 50 states and no more makes this kind of population movement a zero-sum game: either you physically relocate to the country offering better prospects, or you are denied those opportunities.

Yet there is a school of thought which argues that one way to deter large-scale economic migration is for developed countries to invest in job creation in the countries from which migrants would otherwise come. There are of course more factors driving population movement than simply lack of economic opportunities, and there is no suggestion that creating jobs in poorer countries is a panacea. However, some evidence indicates that it can be a factor in reducing the scale of migration; and of course it is beneficial for those countries more generally to become more prosperous and economically developed.

Given all of this, might there be an argument that boosting economic growth and employment in poorer countries could be seen as one element of a wider expansion of rights and opportunities that would flow from statehood? To take an extreme example, in 2022 the fourth most common country of birth among the US immigrant population was the Philippines (easily the largest demographic is from Mexico, accounting for around a quarter). If the Philippines were part of the United States, would all of those people have moved from their homes to America, or is it possible that the rights, benefits and opportunities inherent in statehood might have diminished both the push and pull factors?

This is not a simple equation. As Germany discovered when it was reunited in 1990, the absorption of a poorer state by a richer one requires massive investment and structural and economic inequalities can remain for decades. There is no magic bullet. However, what is certain is that mass migration exists and there is no prospect of it diminishing. What America must decide, therefore, is how it responds to that, and whether retreating behind a “big, beautiful wall”, to borrow a phrase, is adequate or even practical as a solution.

Conclusion

More broadly, breaking the 50-state barrier would change the dynamic of not only American politics but the identity and sense of self of the United States. I say that in a wholly neutral way, and I am aware that opinions will differ sharply. But America, much more plausibly than most countries, can fairly call itself “a nation of immigrants”, and it is as well to remember that there have been times when that has been at least as much a source of pride and national vigour as regret or anxiety. The United States is very unusual, if not perhaps unique in being not just a geographical reality, an area on a map hemmed in by borders, but an idea, an expression of truths and aspirations about the human condition. There is such a thing as “the American dream”, and it has sometimes been a powerful and dynamic factor in the nation’s political development. Barnett’s kind of reframing of America’s potential limits would have a profound effect on that conversation.

The question of “the 51st state”, as it is often encapsulated, can range from the limited and technical to the grand and strategic, and people will find themselves at different points along a spectrum. The case against statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico seem to me to be weak, largely partisan, legalistic and often obfuscatory. The legal and constitutional position of their inhabitants is undoubtedly anomalous and prima facie unfair and the procedural hurdles are real but far from insurmountable, while reliance on the intention of those who established the status quo under unrecognisably different political circumstances is unconvincing. There is a perfectly intelligible argument for Republicans that statehood for those two jurisdictions, and potentially for Guam or American Samoa, would represent an electoral disadvantage for their party, but if that is the principal argument it should be clearly articulated as such, and it is hardly one of great moral force.

For those who want to think bigger, however, to examine more imaginative and expansive questions of nationhood, identity and political trends over the next 30, 40 or 50 years, statehood is a useful springboard to re-examine how nation states work, how they manage mass migration, integration and multiculturalism and how populations will think of themselves and define themselves in one or two generations’ time. It is not a case of “today DC, tomorrow the world”, or creating some kind of international, all-embracing government, but the wider conception prompts interesting questions and may lead to unexpected or innovative answers. I would suggest that it is at least a debate worth having, honestly, openly and in good faith. But, as always in politics, those are ambitions frequently unmet. We shall see.