You guys have a lot of the British Isles (well - mainly Southern England) under a Stars and Stripes. One oddity is that they are all nominally RAF stations - RAF Lakenheath, RAF Alconbury etc. Someone once suggested that this country is the USA’s largest aircraft carrier. I have no doubt that the citizenship rules are the same here as elsewhere and simply being born here does not give the right to British citizenship.
On the bases at one time, British law was only applied in serious cases like murder, but recently it has changed:
I think Dr. Drake is referring to Obama’s potential Kenyan citizenship through his father. If I recall correctly from previous threads, Obama was not a Kenyan citizen, but could have claimed it if he had moved to Kenya prior to a certain age.
This is often said, but it doesn’t match what is on the SecState web-page. When a dual citizen is in the US, they’re treated solely as a US citizen, but it’s not like the US denies the existence of dual citizens, or even requires a new US citizen to give up their other citizenship.
Actually, I believe Obama was born a citizen of the UK and Colonies by virtue of Obama Sr.'s citizenship; when Kenya became independent in 1963, both Jr and Sr automatically became Kenyan citizens.
However, the President lost his Kenyan citizenship when he failed to take an oath of allegiance to Kenya by his 23rd birthday.
See Factcheckfor cites to the controlling statutes.
None of this, of course, affects his U.S. citizenship by virtue of birth in Hawai’i.
The stated claim was that Obama *did *in fact once have another citizenship, not that he could have qualified for it.
He did not, neither Kenyan nor Indonesian.
Might have been George Orwell. 
He did have a second citizenship—see the post above yours. As far as I know, like McCain he never claimed nor made use of it, and it did not overlap with his political career, and he certainly does not now.
My query was because RealityChuck made the claim that EVER being a dual citizen was a disqualifier, which directly contradicts his statement that the US doesn’t recognize dual citizenship. (If they don’t recognize it, why would they even consider it?)
I was looking for the logical that a dual citizen is somehow not a natural-born citizen, the initial claim that RealityChuck made, since it has never precluded any of the previous office holders (Obama, but also earlier presidents who were born with a claim to British citizenship, such as Chester Arthur).
No - he could have qualified if he applied for it in time, yes, but he did not do so and therefore did *not *have a second citizenship, despite your claim.
The US *tolerates *it, and only to a point. See Cecil.
I think you are conflating two things.
It is the government, not the individual, that determines whether someone is a citizen or not. When citizenship is conferred by birth (jus sanguinis), it is the act of birth that makes someone a citizen. The paperwork is merely formal recognition of it.
In Obama’s case, when he was born he held British citizenship by jus sanguinis, through virtue of his father. The fact that the British government was never formally informed of his existence does not negate the fact that he held citizenship. Upon Kenya’s independence and the creation of Kenyan citizenship, he became a Kenyan citizen by the same process. Read the factcheck cite above: it’s very clear. Obama was a dual citizen from 1961, when he was born in Hawai’i, until 1984, when he Kenyan citizenship lapsed through lack of action on Obama’s part.
Since this is GQ, can you provide a counter-cite to the Factcheck which states that one’s jus sanguinis citizenship does not begin until a claim is filed?
All of this, in my mind, is absolutely immaterial to his status as a natural-born citizen of the USA.
I seem to remember in grade school social studies class that, amongst other instances where a child born under this-or-that circumstances, a child born on a US Naval vessel is defacto born on US soil and thus a citizen.
If holding the citizenship of another country ruled one out from being a natural-born citizen, then we’d be opening the doors for other nations to troll us by conferring citizenship on whichever presidential candidates they liked least. “Ha, no, Bob Smith can’t be President! He’s now officially a citizen of Hackysackistan!”