Coudert questioned the foreign nature of a territory

Coudert questioned the “foreign” nature of a territory that was under the sover-
eignty and jurisdiction of the U.S., one of the main arguments presented by the U.S.
government in this case:

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Citizenship and the Alien Exclusion in the Insular Cases • Edgardo Meléndez
We claim that no country which is under the full and sovereign jurisdiction of the
United States, to which no other country has any claim under any doctrine of internation-
al law, but which is wholly and absolutely under the immediate sovereignty of the United
States, can possibly by any construction of terms be “foreign.” In order to be “foreign” it
must be under a different sovereignty, belonging to a different member of the family of
nations as known to public law... . [t]he sovereignty over Porto Rico after the cession was
the sovereignty of the people of the United States, and certainly Porto Rico could not be
foreign to its own sovereign.
29
Justice White’s well-known statement that Puerto Rico was “foreign in a domestic
sense” should be understood as a response to Coudert’s argument that the island could
not be declared as “foreign” to the United States if it was a “domestic” territory not
under the sovereignty of a foreign nation.
Coudert asserted that Puerto Ricans must be considered citizens since they are clear-
ly under “the jurisdiction of the United States” as established by the 14th Amendment;
if this is so, then Puerto Rico has to be proclaimed as part of the U.S.
30
He addressed the
relationship between “nationality,” “subject,” and “citizenship” as follows:
Citizenship in our language means two things. It has a confused meaning. It means
nationality —belonging to some particular country in the political sense—some par-
ticular nation under a sovereign jurisdiction, and in that sense all within our territory,
owing us permanence allegiance, are citizens; women, children and all persons in the
Territories; “citizen,” I want to make this clear, is absolutely identical with “subject”
when used in that sense. Citizenship and subjection depend on two things, the alle-
giance of the citizen and the protection which the government owes to him. When
those two things are united, we have “naked citizenship,” or subjection.
31
Coudert presented here the very same argument that he would deliver again in
Gonzales : that by virtue of being “subjects” of the U.S. and thus enjoying U.S. “national-
ity” Puerto Ricans are U.S. “nationals,” an inferior status of “citizenship.”
Coudert questioned the Attorney General’s thesis of the two historical examples
of U.S. “subjects” that were not citizens: “the Indian tribes” and “the free negro [sic]
before the XIV Amendment.” In reference to the latter category—free Blacks before
the 14th Amendment as defined by Dred Scott —the Downes Co. counsel remarked: “I
confess that I heard with some surprise the bringing forward by the Government of
that instance.” Coudert then inquired:

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