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Sorry, he is. From the State Department website:
Puerto Ricans weren't granted citizenship by treaty but through the Jones Act in 1917. You can make the argument that gaining citizenship by statute isn't the same as being entitled to citizenship under the Constitution, but by that logic you'd have to concede that John McCain and Ted Cruz aren't Americans either. McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, which was under US jurisdiction at the time but not an incorporated territory, and Cruz was born in Canada, a foreign country. Both rely on statutes outlining the circumstances under which children of US citizens born abroad can claim US citizenship.
You are reducing American Citizenship down to the equivalent of a Costco membership.
If America isn’t a people by race then we must be a people by creed. An idea. But BB rejected all that.
What’s left is just like a membership card to Costco.
I do agree we have at a minimum a few million people today where America is neither blood nor creed. I have friends in this bucket.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you didn’t think thru the argument before going legalistic. A legal argument of being American reduces American to a Costco Membership.
No, I'm reducing American citizenship to the terms outlined in the Constitution and US law, which is the only definition that matters. What you're trying to do is introduce additional criteria that doesn't come from anywhere accept your own imagination to define American as that which conforms to your own biases of what Americans are supposed to be. Well, two can play at that game; for that matter, 200 million can play at that game, and you don't have any authority to make that determination over them. The only authority that matters in this case is that of the US government, and that is who I'll defer to on definitions of who counts as an American. You can't just invent your own definitions for things that are already well-defined because the implications make you uncomfortable.
Fair, and at risk of saying not much, I'd say that it's, uh, complicated. For example, I have good friends who were born and raised Canadian citizens and who later acquired US citizenship, too.1 For several of them, (not brushing with any broader of a brush), they're basically understood to be (and would describe themselves as) "Canadian, but also with US citizenship". Are they "American"? Uh... kinda yeah? Also maybe kinda no? If you just asked them if they were "American", I think they'd say, "I'm Canadian, but I have US citizenship." Does that matter? I don't particularly take a position either way.
Different individuals among them may have different senses of it, too. Some, for example, really are effectively Canadian at heart. One guy I know discovered that one of his ancestors also had US citizenship, and found that the paperwork to go the route of attaining citizenship that way was easier for him than going through spousal immigration in order to move here with his wife.2 If it had been just as easy to do it the other way, would he have bothered? I don't know; it's a counterfactual, and lots of things can come into play over time. But he might have been perfectly happy being "Canadian citizen and US Permanent Resident" indefinitely. Does this matter? I don't know. I can vaguely see both sides.
For what it's worth, my best Puerto Rican friend would say, "I'm Puerto Rican, and oh by the way, we have American citizenship." Does that matter? Hell, I don't know.
You're obviously right that the only non-squishy way to draw lines is via citizenship, but my observation is that a lot of folks view the real world as inherently squishy.
1 - I also know at least one guy born/raised in the US. He and his wife moved to Canada for work for several years. He got Canadian citizenship, she didn't. They would explicitly say that the reason he got Canadian citizenship was just because it made dealing with a certain Canadian law regarding his line of work easier. They've lived back in the US for quite a few years now. I don't think either of them would say they're "Canadian". If you just asked them, they'd probably say that he was "American", full stop. If you went on to ask him about his time in Canada, he'd add, "...and yeah, I did get Canadian citizenship."
2 - For this particular couple, they actually moved to Canada first when they got married; she went through whatever process to be able to move up there and be married to him. I don't know if she acquired Canadian citizenship at any point. Later, when they decided they wanted to live in the US (for a particular work reason), they discovered this business about his ancestor. Where they're living and what citizenship he has is just sort of an incidental and paperwork thing to them.
As I mention below, bright line rules are easy to state but are over and under inclusive. Just because a standard has fuzziness doesn’t mean it’s worse than a bright line rule which isn’t fuzzy but doesn’t get at the nature of what people are asking.
I think there might be two tests I would use.
The vacation test: if you are abroad and a non government person asks “what are you” do you respond American or something else (eg Puerto Rican)
The second is if the U.S. was in a hotly contested war would you strongly take up its defense?
I think the combo of the two are helpful.
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A country isn’t words on paper. If they were then many countries would be America.
We can debate whether America can reject someone who wants to be America. But I think a bare minimum for considering yourself an American is whether to the best of your ability and knowledge work to improve and protect America.
For someone like Trump we may debate whether his view of America is correct. But he did bleed for America. He did risks spending the rest of his life in jail for America. He’s clearly a patriot though we can disagree on whether he methods are wrong. Do I think BB would do that for America - no.
You have aptly described the definition of legal citizenship. I am not using American as “legal citizen”. I don’t believe bad bunny even describes himself as an American.
That's... a stretch, because that would disqualify about 90% of Americans.
There's nothing more American than looting the commons for your own benefit; socializing the losses and privatizing the gains. Bad Bunny is doing the most American of things; being paid to celebrate himself and perform a victory dance on a defeated people, and to make them pay for the privilege. Improve? Protect? He's getting that bread, if American society was getting worse he'd move somewhere else after getting his bag.
This is the most American of things. Men are free, and when free, this is what significant amounts of them do.
Do we live in different countries? Or are you under 25? 90% of Americans do not loot the commons. Nobody does. That’s a post 2016 commons breaking down. It’s not the America I grew up in. This is literally what we are fighting for to prevent America from going down that path.
The reason freedom worked in America is due to Americans being able to work for the collective good and not be solely self-centered. If everyone robbed from each other the entire experiment would have never worked.
Post 2016??? What?? America's nowhere close to unique in this case, but even the most rose -tinted views of American society should understand that the "fuck you, got mine" attitude is endemic in the country and the people who don't hold that view are consigned to being victimized by those who do.
The 2016 commons "breaking down" didn't come out of nowhere and didn't start in 2016. It comes out of many reasons, among them a long line of short term decisions being made to solve problems and kicking the can down the road; even a relatively short term view that only considers federal governance alone can be dated back to the LBJ Great Society, the chain from Ford-Carter-Reagan, Dubya 1, the Clinton corporatization consolidation years, Dubya 2's action and then the Obama-era expansion of the surveillance state. That's without talking about money, the economy, the labor and mortgage markets. America is a country where there are outsized, stratospheric rewards for playing defectbot.
Somewhere, FDR is pulling a sad Pikachu face because he was left out of this line.
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I am sorry you feel this way and sorry you grew up around people who think this way. It is not the America I experienced.
I don’t believe we “kicked the can down the road”. The Great Society was an attempt to end poverty. Reaganism was a mostly successful attempt at improving American prosperity.
Why does Harvard have a $50 billion endowment? It’s because a lot of people donated money wanting to give something back for (unrelated) people who come after them. Why did so many people sign up for the military when those towers fell? Or those boys who died on those beaches in Normandy? Why did Carnegie give all his money away?
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This is certainly a view one can hold. By all means, maintain the same perspective when it is you getting got.
Oh, absolutely, I completely expect to get got at some point by those who have it worse than I do and have the opportunity to. I don't even begrudge them for it. The old saw about capitalism being to blame for everything/what we have now isn't real capitalism aside, capitalism has proven more robust and powerful than other economic systems because it considers and accounts for self-interest. I don't see myself as being more powerful than incentive, nor do I expect to be.
On the other hand, I didn't watch the Super Bowl nor did I pay for tickets.
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You're the one who brought up citizenship, which is irrelevant. OP was not talking about citizenship but affinity.
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He's saying that he's not culturally American in any meaningful sense: "He has zero American values. He does not speak English."
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