Thursday, July 4, 2013

United States Territories

My friend Sue is still studying for her citizenship test, and today we were talking about 50 states and it came up why Puerto Rico is still a territory instead of a state.  And it got me wondering, how many territories does the US have anyway?

According to Wikipedia, there are five inhabited territories and nine 9 un-inhabited territories:

The five inhabited territories are:

Puerto Rico
Guam
American Samoa
United States Virgin Islands
Northern Mariana Islands

The territories have different governmental structures, which I thought was interesting.  Both the Northern Mariana Islands and Puerto Rico are Commonwealths while American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam have a governor.  Commonwealths have voting privileges for all their citizens, while territories do not.  All five territories do have elected representatives to U.S. Congress but they are non-voting representatives.


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