

I don’t think it ever did. It does qualify you for legal residency status, resident alien or “green card” as most people refer to it. I’m pretty sure that status can be voided if you did anything illegal along the way. For citizen status you still have to go through the process.
So I’m sure how we conceive of being the dominant species is biased. But if we talk about civilizations and their ability to eventually propagate beyond earth, I don’t think dolphins have it. Their ancestry tried out land and said “nah, back to the water”. Not to mention anything we do that takes humans out of the equation entirely is going to probably kill off the dolphins, apes, elephants, basically most of the mammalians. It’ll be so long before something evolves to take our place as “earthlings” all our works will be fossils at best