Is orienting Puerto Rico towards statehood in the interest of the United States?

The Governor of Puerto Rico is working hard to make Puerto Rico a state of the United States, and it has an impoverished mass of people behind him as a consequence of the neglect of the US Congress to foster long term conditions for the development of the Island and its reluctance to orient this territory in accordance with its national interests, as it did with the Philippines during the middle of the twentieth century.  There seems to be a vacuum there.

The territorial arrangement established after the Second World War has failed and its economy is in shambles. Moreover, Puerto Rico is culturally much closer to the Dominican Republic, Cuba and México, than it is to Arizona, Florida or Texas; and the three main migratory flows towards the Island originate in the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Colombia, all Spanish speaking countries.

As an independent country, Puerto Rico will join countries of territorial extension and demographic size similar to Jamaica, Barbados, Panama, and other nations of the Caribbean basin. The United States should work towards that outcome.

 

Integrating a Latin American country as a state is an unwise option, both for the United States and for Puerto Rico. If the US makes Puerto Rico its first Hispanic state, it will also be the first exit of a state from the Union!

                                  

Aarón Gamaliel Ramos

Professor and Author