If you were just dropped in this place with no prior knowledge, where would you guess you were? Maybe Florida or California or Hawaii—somewhere tropical but this is definitely the US. It just looks like the US. From the style of signs to the way the roads look to the stores that line the streets, you can tell it’s the US but it’s not Florida, it’s not California, it’s not Hawaii, it’s not even on this side of the world. It’s America’s most isolated territory. It’s Guam. The United States has five inhabited territories—the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam itself. Guam is the furthest of these five from the continental US—nearly 8,000 miles away from Washington, DC—making it the most isolated.
Beijing, Delhi, Cape Town, and Buenos Aires are all closer to DC than Guam is and yet the island is a fully fledged territory of the US. It is the US. Guam has been inhabited for thousands of years by the native Chamorro people until the 1500s when it was first claimed as a territory by Spain. Centuries later, after the US’ victory in the Spanish-American war, the territory was ceded to the United States along with Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Aside from a brief and brutal Japanese occupation during World War Two, the island has remained part of the US ever since.
Many Americans had never even heard of Guam until summer 2017.
That was when North Korean leader Kim Jong-un threatened to launch a ballistic missile at Guam. The threats may have since subsided, but the effects of that summer have not. The island stretches less than 30 miles from top to bottom which makes it smaller than every other US state and territory and yet it packs more than 160,000 people into that small size. In fact, it’s more densely populated than all but five US states or territories. Meanwhile, it is by far the most developed place in Micronesia.
To put it in perspective, Guam’s neighboring islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, which are also part of the US, have a GDP per capita of $16,800 while Guam’s is more than $35,000. Kiribati, meanwhile, the most populous county in Micronesia, has a GDP per capita of $1,500. Guam is an outpost of the modern, developed world in one of the poorest regions of the world. Its location though, is its greatest asset. It’s economy exists because of where it is. The island is three hours from Tokyo, four hours from Seoul, and five hours from Hong Kong. It’s close to Asia but it is still the US—unequivocally.
You see American license plates, American school buses, American-style ambulances, they have US post offices, they use the US dollar, they have American stores, American hotels, US National Parks, US airlines. There is no compromise on the American-ness of Guam because it is the US. They fly the US flag and for tourists, this is a draw. Instead of flying seven hours to Hawaii or ten hours to California, Japanese tourists can and do just fly three hours to Guam in order to visit the US. The malls, which look identical to any in Virginia or Kansas or anywhere else in the US, are hugely popular with Asian tourists as they can buy American goods for a fraction of what they would cost in Asia.
About 1.5 million people visit the island of 160 thousand each year, but what’s not good for tourism is missile threats. “Last summer when they were playing ‘who’s missile’s bigger’ we were the ones who suffered, you know, our tourism took a huge nosedive that month of August. We never saw so many news agencies coming to Guam from countries that didn’t even realize we existed because all of a sudden Kim Jung Un was threatening the American territory in the Pacific.” (17:39) This is Benjamin Cruz, speaker of the Guam Legislature. As he said, the island’s economy suffered immensely from the North Korean missile threat.
Many visitors of Guam come as parts of school groups or corporate retreats and these groups in particular almost universally cancelled their trips. “We lost, I mean, almost all of Japan stopped coming. I mean, everybody was afraid to come, the only ones that were coming were the news media.” (28:00) Fortunately, the effects were partially mitigated by an increase in visitors from South Korea who were less worried about missile threats since its a reality they live every day back home, but for an island so centered around tourism, being dragged into politics is never good. Despite being part of the US, though, Guam functions politically differently from every other part of the US. Benjamin Cruz, along with the 14 other senators, are the lawmakers of Guam. They can legislate just like any state legislature, but the main political difference for Guam is at the federal level.
All the US federal laws, the ones made in Washington for the whole country, all those laws apply in Guam. What Guam doesn’t get though, is a vote. Their congressional representatives don’t get a vote so by extension, the people of Guam can't vote on the laws that apply to them. In addition, unlike Washington, DC, which also does’t receive a vote in Congress, Guam, along with the other US territories, is not able to vote for their president—the US president.
This presents an issue not only because of the lapse in democracy, but also because many US laws that may make sense for the continental United States just don’t for a territory on the other side of the world. “We’d like to be able to invite people to the island and industries and not have to worry about whether the SEC would approve it or the FCC would approve it.
We’d like to be able to have control over our skies so we can invite airlines to fly in without having to clear with FAA on whether or not this airline or that airline can or cannot fly.” (13:10) The process for a foreign airline of gaining approval to fly to the US is often long and laborious and there are a number of special security and immigration rules for flights to the US. This isn’t a problem for large, intercontinental airlines or Mexican or Canadian ones for whom flights to the US represent a large part of their market, but for small regional Asian carriers, they might pass on flights to Guam just to avoid having to gain FAA approval. Another issue for Guam is the Jones Act.
This law prevents foreign built, owned, or operated ships from carrying cargo or passengers between US ports. This may make sense within the continental United States. Just as you wouldn’t want a foreign airline flying domestic cargo routes you wouldn’t want a foreign shipping company taking over cargo routes like Houston to Charleston or Seattle to Oakland but Guam is a different story. Cargo ships generally make many stops along their routes so it would be perfectly normal for a Taiwanese ship, for example, to go from Oakland to Hawaii to Guam to Osaka to Taipei but it can’t because then it’d be transporting goods between US ports.
Instead, only US ships can bring goods from the US, where most of Guam’s goods come from, to Guam. Other US territories like American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands are exempt from this rule but Guam is still subject to it which makes shipping to the island more expensive. Despite the issues the US federal government may cause, the people of Guam are in no hurry to distance themselves from it. “I think if you were to ask a majority of the people on the island they would like to have a closer union with the United States and some may even want statehood. In fact, a majority of them would like to see statehood.” (5:00) In many ways, Guam is one of the most patriotic areas in the US. The US military freed Guam from a brutal and deadly Japanese occupation during World War Two which many of the older residents still remember.
The younger residents, meanwhile, quite often work for the US.
“Just about every family on this island, I’m sure almost every family on this island had at least one member of their family serve in the military.” (11:40) One out of eight residents of Guam serve or have served in the US armed forces. It has a higher enlistment rate than any US state but this is helped by the fact that a quarter of the island is US military bases. The island is one of the US military’s most strategic assets. Of course the US has plenty of bases in Japan and South Korea but Guam is US soil less than four hours away from North Korea, the East China Sea, and the South China Sea—all possible flash-points for US conflict.
The US military is the single largest employer on Guam and its economy depends on the military. While tourism may have suffered recently, the military business is good. The number of military personnel stationed on Guam is slated to more than double in the coming decade which will no doubt stimulate the economy. This doesn’t come without concern, Guam only has so much land, but all factors considered, Guam is on the rise. Guam is truly a unique place.
Plenty of countries have territories far away from their mainland but few are as developed and as similar to the rest of the country as Guam. If Guam was just off the coast of the US mainland it would be totally unremarkable—just another piece of the US that looks and acts like the rest of the US—but it’s not. It’s on the other side of the world. Guam is a relic of colonialism but today it’s a thriving, developed place. It may not get treated like the US even by its own government, but in all other ways, Guam is the United States.
One aspect of Guam’s story that this post didn’t cover is how they’re trying to grow their local, small businesses in order to make the economy more self-sustaining. Squarespace also helps with this. They help small businesses make what was previously only available for huge companies—a great, beautifully designed, professional-looking website.
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