My parents moved there when I was in law school so then I went a lot more, sometimes for weeks at a time. I've probably been there 15 to 20 times.  San Juan and Dorado Beach mostly, but for for a while they lived near Arecibo, Aguadilla and Rincon, a great surfing beach, so I went there too.  

Because if Mittens' wish were somehow granted and that was actually the case, young Mitt would hardly have grown up as the pampered youngest son of Chrysler's CEO and Michigan's governor. Rather, his name would be Manolo, and he probably would've instead been caught repeatedly by INS and the U.S. Border Patrol, while trying to cross the Rio Grande illegally from Juarez into El Paso.

In Hawaii's case, it's too bad the U.S. Congress didn't see fit to allow islanders any say in the matter when we were unilaterally overthrowing Queen Liliuokalani's government by force of arms in January 1893 -- installing in its place a provisional government called "The Committee of Public Safety," which consisted of a mere handful of white males (two of whom had only resided in Hawaii less than a year!) -- before formally annexing the entire country in August 1898.

Without a doubt, the American takeover was roundly opposed by the overwhelming majority of the Hawaiian kingdom's citizens at the time, hands down.

On the eve of the 1898 annexation vote in Congress, Secretary of State John Sherman was formally presented with a petition written in both English and Hawaiian by the Queen and her representatives, which urged Congress to reject the pending joint resolution and contained the signatures of over 20,000 Native Hawaiians, a remarkable document given the logistics and political conditions as they existed in Hawaii at the time.

That petition was read on the floor of the U.S. Senate, accepted by a formal vote, and then locked away in a file cabinet at the State Department. There, it remained forgotten until inadvertantly rediscovered 94 years later in June 1992 by department personnel, who had decided one day to review the contents of some old file cabinets cluttering up the basement.

(This constituted a huge find from an historical perspective, mostly because it so obviously contradicted the prevailing "conventional wisdom" of the time, which had long held that the U.S. annexation of Hawaii was met with near-universal acclaim in the islands. Clearly, it was not.)

Even 60 years later, hard feelings amongst Native Hawaiians over the loss of their national sovereignty still very much lingered. During the 1959 statehood plebiscite, Native Hawaiians constituted the only ethnic demographic to reject the congressional resolution at the ballot box, and further, they did so by a nearly 15-to-1 margin.

That's the cold, hard truth about the nature of U.S. socio-economic imperialism as it impacted Native Hawaiians, which is never taught in American history classes. Sorry if that makes some people uncomfortable, but that's just the way it was -- and to a great (and very much under-reported) extent, still is.