Since the 1898 US invasion of Puerto Rico, rhetorical, legal, and political forms of emptying have also been central. This prompted political scientist Edgardo Meléndez to observe that, “Migration is a crucial factor in understanding the Puerto Rican experience under US rule” (2017). Even before the United States occupied Puerto Rico in 1898, the American desire for an empty island was present in the military imagination, as strategists wished for a vacant isle, so they could train and test without negotiating with local civilians. A symptom of the colonial desire for emptiness and the reality of an undesirable people was to make a clear distinction between what was wanted—the islands—and what was not wanted: the people. This was crystallized in the title of the popular multivolume turn-of-the-century books on the United States’ new empire, Our Islands and Their Peoples (de Olivares 1899).