Why are Puerto Ricans considered American?
When India was a colony of England, we did not go out of our way to consider Indians to be "Englishmen". Indians did not even want to be seen that way. They were proud of being Indian.
Liberals are aggressively concerned about Puerto Rico lately. But Puerto Rico has twice the obesity rate of Mississippi, 10 times the teen pregnancy rate, 10 times the debt, 200 times the violence, etc... Mississippi is seen as an outlier, but Puerto Rico is in another league. Liberals like to compare red states and blue states to prove that red states are bad. But they always forget about Puerto Rico. It's the reverse of forgetting about Asians when talking about white privilidge.
America is the reason Puerto Rico is as good as it is and liberals know this. If we gave them independence which they don't want, they would slide down to the level of Honduras, or Trinidad and compete for IMF lifetime membership award. I still support independence on principle. It is not our job to hold them up. Colonialism is a moral hazard and we see that with liberals pushing for bailouts. America will always be condemned for not doing enough even when we enable them by doing too much, because that's the scam.