I should hope not! I was born in the US of a Canadian mother, and a US father. By Canadian law, I’m a Canadian citizen, due to being born of a citizen of Canada, so my US citizenship status would be determined by Canada’s law, not by the law of my US father’s country and the law of my US birthplace. That wouldn’t make sense, as it lets other countries determine the US citizenship status of anyone, merely by making their law say that person is a citizen of their country.
A similar case came up in Canada during World War II, when the future Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was staying in Ottawa. While there, she gave birth to Princess Margriet. In order to avoid any question of Canadian citizenship for the baby, the Governor in Council issued a special proclamation declaring the hospital room to be extraterritorial during the birth.
(In return for the hospitality of the Canadians, Queen Juliana instituted an annual gift of thousands and thousands of tulips for the City of Ottawa every year, leading to the May tulip festival in the capital.)
I’m in exactly the same situation. What I wanted was for KneeSid to clarify his / her information, because as stated it’s clearly not true for just that reason.
I quoted what the Supreme Court said in this post. The Supreme Court, in fact, said exactly the opposite.
It said:
- The phrase “unless they are subject to any foreign power” doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means.
- In any case, the law that contained that phrase was overruled by the 14th Amendment.
Yes, I saw that; thanks. I don’t know if Cheshire Human saw it.
Wait a sec, though: Churchhill was a citizen by birth: his mother was American. he may not have claimed it, but he could have.
Winston Churchill was born in 1874, so you need to apply U.S. citizenship law as it was at the time. At the time, citizenship to children born abroad only descended through the father: the fact that Jenny Churchill was a U.S. citizen was irrelevant.
Yes, in fact mothers could not pass citizenship to their foreign-born children until the Citizenship Act of 1934 became law.
I thought Queen Noor (the queen dowager of Jordan) might be in a similar position, but she renounced her US citizenship upon marrying King Hussein.
While it may have changed since then, back in the early 2000s, I was exploring quite closely what I might do to lose my American citizenship. (To avoid doing such.)
One of the factors that the State Department accepts as presumptive intention of renouncing U.S. citizenship is if one accepts a policy making position in a foreign government. (I could be an MP in Canada without losing citizenship; I would lose it should I join the Cabinet.)
I would certainly expect that becoming the monarch of a foreign nation would qualify, and that while such a person as posited in the OP and the Thai king referenced above may at one point have been U.S. citizens, on accepting the throne they would lose (have lost) that status.
Lovely. The kid runs for the presidency and wins, Wills drops dead and the kid is president of the U.S. and king of Canada.
Run away! Run away!
I saw it, too. I was quite aware that it wasn’t an issue. I was merely explaining why. I also wasn’t aware that you already knew why.
The Perfect Master speaks: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/841/how-do-i-go-about-renouncing-my-u-s-citizenship
The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, chanced to have been born in New York City, where his mother was passing through at the time. When arriving in the US some years ago an immigration official told him he had to travel on a US passport whether he wanted to or not.
The third president of Ireland (and more or less the most important political figure in modern Irish history), Éamon de Valera, was also born in New York. According to the story that was accepted during his lifetime, he was the child of a mother who was an Irish citizen and her husband, an artist who was born in Spain (or maybe Cuba) and who died not too long after de Valera’s birth. It’s now suspected that his mother made up the marriage and the husband. She suppposedly became pregnant while single, so she told people back home that she had married a Spanish artist who died soon after the birth on a trip to somewhere in the western U.S.:
I’ve been trying to make up scenarios in which this could have screwed up de Valera’s presidency. Suppose after de Valera had become president, his real father had shown up and announced that he hadn’t given de Valera’s mother permission to send him back to Ireland. Because of this, de Valera was illegally in Ireland, and thus he never legally was an Irish citizen, and thus he wasn’t actually the president. O.K., I don’t know if this would have worked or not, since I don’t know the relevant laws.
It wouldn’t work. de Valera satisfied two criteria sufficient to become a citizen of the Irish Free State: he was resident in December 1922 and his mother was born in Ireland.
Interestingly, de Valera was an elected (but abstentionist) Northern Ireland MP at the same time that he was head of the Free State government. This may be a historically unique case of a serving head of government being elected as a member of parliament in another jurisdiction.
Assuming de Valera was illegitimate, then he was a British subject (by descent from his mother) and had a right of entry into Ireland (which was part of the UK at the time he returned) and so was lawfully resident in what became the Free State in 1922. The Irish Free State Constitution conferred citizenship on anyone resident there in 1922 if (a) they were born there, or (b) they had a parent born there, or (c) they had been resident there for at least seven years. De Valera would have qualified under either (b) or (c), and so he acquired the citizenship of the Free State.
Ironically, if we assume his mother’s story to be true, his situation is in theory more difficult. She would have lost her British subject status on marrying a foreign subject, so de Valera would not have been a British subject by birth. This meant that the British could have excluded him from the UK.
But, in fact, they didn’t, so he entered the UK lawfully - at the time, you didn’t need an affirmative right to enter; if you weren’t turned away, then you were lawfully there. And since he was lawfully resident in what became the Free State in 1922, he became a citizen.
Whether de Valera’s father consented to his being brought to Ireland would have no implications at all, regardless of whether his parents were married or not. In a family dispute unilaterally bringing a child into another country may be in breach of a court order, or of parental rights, but generally that has no implications for immigration status.
If 26 more states ratify TONA and Congress does not give their approval then the answer to the OP is no.
Maybe not:
[QUOTE=U.S.Constitution Article I Section 9 Clause 8]
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
[/QUOTE]
This appears to forbid the POTUS from accepting the Kinsgship of Canada (or whatever you want to call it), at least without Congressional approval. Though maybe Congressional approval isn’t so far-fetched, if the now-at-least-35-years-old kid is such a great politician that he can get elected POTUS despite his immigrant roots. And the only way to enforce this is probably for Congress to impeach the kid, so he could be both POTUS and King until the impeachment trial is over.
Now, if the kid becomes King first, and then runs for the presidency, he could argue he accepted the title before was holding an Office, and there’s nothing in the constitution about HOLDING a title while in office.
Actually, the Thai King’s father was only a prince who never held the office of king, and was in the US attending medical school at Harvard. It is likely he was actually on a student visa making the Thai King quite eligible to be a US citizen by birth. The fact he became king shouldn’t automatically remove his dual citizenship status, but I am no lawyer. It is a great question to me as this would make the Thai King eligible to become US president should he have ever lived in the US for the required time.
Now, given the King may be a citizen of the US, does this mean the entire Thai Royal Family are now citizens by birth given they were all born to a likely US citizen?