Guam is militarily central yet bureaucratically treated as foreign

Evidence

As the University of Guam professor Michael Bevacqua puts it, Guam has “the paradoxical nature of being [considered] a tiny, insignificant footnote to the United States” while sitting “at the center of American power.” Indeed, few in the fifty states ever think about this island. For the people of Guam this means dealing with daily reminders of their marginalization. When some of Guam’s politicians visited Washington, D.C., officials from the Department of the Interior—the federal department that oversees Guam—asked for their “foreign passports.” A student at the University of Washington told me he received a call from the registrar’s office asking about converting Guam’s currency into dollars. (Like the rest of the United States, Guam uses the U.S. dollar.) — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 235

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the larger theme across Base Nation of bases embedding extractive neglect of local populations — parallels the Okinawa chapters and the ‘base of empire’ logic.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 235