AS-AT LARGE 2022 redistricting
Single non-voting delegate representing 55,000 US nationals (not citizens) across islands where 85% of GDP depends on one tuna cannery.
American Samoa's at-large congressional district represents approximately 55,000 residents across the five inhabited islands through a single non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives. Like other unincorporated territories, American Samoans hold US nationality but not citizenship—a unique status among territories that affects travel, voting, and federal benefit eligibility. The 2022 redistricting maintained the unified at-large structure because population doesn't justify subdivision. This delegate must represent deeply divergent constituencies: Eastern District's government and cannery employment concentration, Western District's urbanizing residential growth, and Manu'a's traditional subsistence communities. The territory's economic vulnerability—with StarKist's cannery generating 85% of GDP and 99.5% of exports—makes federal policy decisions existentially significant. Minimum wage legislation, fishing zone restrictions, and federal transfer levels all flow through a representative who cannot vote on final passage. American Samoa's traditional Polynesian governance system, where matai (chiefs) manage communally-owned land covering 90% of territory, coexists uneasily with federal structures. The at-large framework means one voice must navigate between subsistence fishing village interests and industrial cannery employment, between communal land customs and federal property law, between US nationality and questions about full citizenship.