As the rest of us were voting earlier this month, John Fitisemanu was left out in the cold.
Fitisemanu has lived in Woods Cross for 18 years, works in the health care industry, sent his four kids to public schools and is, by any standard, American. But he is, by law, a second-class American.
That’s because he was born in American Samoa and, like tens of thousands of others, is denied full citizenship because of a peculiar, racially biased provision that has existed in U.S. immigration law put in place in the U.S. Nationality Act of 1940.