Do children of US citizens always get citizenship?

A couple of weeks ago, during a family dinner, the subject of Barak Obama’s birth certificate came up. I’ve always thought that the birth certificate controversy was irrelevant, that even if Obama wasn’t born in the United States, he’s a citizen because his mother was a US citizen. My father-in-law insists that this isn’t true. He says that it’s only automatic for the children of military or government agents who are stationed oversees, and for everyone else, there’s a procedure that must be followed in order for the child’s citizenship to be recognized.

So who’s right? What are the rules for foreign-born children of US citizens?

We’ve discussed this before, but one complicating issue in Obama’s case is that the rules were different when he was born, and indeed if he had been born outside the US to the same mother and father he would not be a US citizen, because his mother was too young to have satisfied the relevant rule. It would be different today.

Also, you can be a US citizen (naturalized) but still be ineligible to be President. So the question is, are children born abroad of US citizens counted as US-born, or is it simply that they are automatically qualified for naturalization?

The plain fact is that the constitutional term “natural born citizen” has never been clearly defined. But there do appear to be statutory limits. When my children were born outside the US, my wife and I filled out a form attesting that we were US citizens who had lived (this is from extemely fallible memory) for 7 years in the US. As far as I know the consular birth certificate issued made them natural born citizens.

The only remotely relevant court decision I know of was when someone challenged Robert Kennedy’s NY state residency when he ran for the senate. The court said, if effect, let the voters decide. If he wins, that will mean the voters have accepted him as a NY resident and if he loses, it is moot.

In this case, I suppose the “voters” are the presidential electors or maybe the senate that counts the votes.

Laws vary in time and by country, but…

Some laws up until the 60’s or 70’s, for some countries - the father’s citizenship could be inherited but not the mother’s. Most countries that accept sexual equality have updated these laws. Some countries even used to allow you to iherit the grandfather’s citizenship.

All these laws had the limitation that the father, the parents or the grandfather had to be born in that country. IIRC, there was the discussion during the Falklands war that some British Falklanders who had been there more than 2 generations were not legally entitled to live in Britain. Obviously, many countries want the rights of expatriate families to disappear sometime once they’ve lived abroad for more than a generation.

But then there’s the other issue, that this is irrelevant for the deluded few who argue about Obama’s birth. The US Constitution specifically says that the president must be “natural-born”. Few disputed that John McCain (born in the Panama Canal zone when it was US-controlled and his father was stationed there in the Navy) was legally entitled to be president.

So there are different types of citizen depending on birth location…

Also - I marvel at the type of person whose single-minded focus has forgotten what the world was like in 1960. What white woman in her right mind in 1960 would travel halfway around the world to give birth in a third-world country? While eight months pregnant? There were no jumbo jets then; even regular jet travel was a rarity. The flight would be long and difficult even if not pregnant. Such travel would be a big deal. It would be surprising if it happened and left no record.

(As a foreigner, I don’t understand the whole birth certificate thing anyway - I have yet to hear any single shred of evidence that his mother travelled to Africa at that time, other than wishful thinking spoken by self-deluded fools).

You’re more right, but you’re both somewhat wrong. Here’s the current U.S. code on who is a U.S. citizen.

Even under current citizenship law, a child of a U.S. citizen is not automatically a U.S. citizen. If the child is born abroad to two U.S. citizens, the child is a citizen as long as at least one of them has lived in the U.S. for some amount of time. If the child is born abroad to a U.S. citizen and a foreign national, then the U.S. citizen must have spent at least five years living in the U.S., at least two of which were after the U.S. parent’s fourteenth birthday. These restrictions are basically to prevent generation after generation of U.S. citizens being born without their even setting foot in the United States.

I’m not entirely sure what your father-in-law is referring to, but it sounds like he’s referring to the Consular Report of Birth Abroad. Basically, when a child is born abroad, his or her parents are supposed to present the appropriate documentation to the nearest U.S. consulate; the consulate looks over the documents and sends the parents a certificate saying “Yup, your kid’s a U.S. citizen.” I have one of these myself, since my parents are U.S. citizens but I was born in Canada. If the parents never actually file for the consular report, it looks like the child himself/herself can file for a Certificate of Citizenship later on. In any event, though, someone born abroad under circumstances that qualify him or her for U.S. citizenship won’t automatically lose their citizenship if they don’t file for these forms; they just won’t be able to prove it.

I am, of course, not a lawyer. Citizenship information above is for novelty purposes only.

Neither of you are exactly right. At the moment, if a child is born outside the United States, and both parents are US citizens, the child is automatically a US citizen from birth. If only one parent is a US citizen, there is a residency requirement for that parent, which if I remember correctly is five years of residence in the US, at least two of those years after his or her fourteenth birthday. In addition, if the US-citizen parent is the father, either the parents must be married or the father must legally acknowledge paternity.

According to US law, if a child qualifies for US citizenship, then the child automatically has that citizenship - there’s no application required for the citizenship or for the citizenship to be recognized. However, the parents are strongly encouraged to apply for a Consular Report of Citizen Birth Abroad as soon as possible to make sure all the paperwork is in order. After all, there’s not much use in having a certain citizenship if you can’t prove it!

At the time of Barack Obama’s birth, the residency requirements for US citizen parents of children born outside the US were longer, as Giles mentioned.

What became of all the war babies? I have to think after WW2 many women in Germany and France were pregnant with american GI babies. Could they become citizens or was their a special exception made to “war babies”

Everything you ever wanted to know about citizenship can be found here in the Immigration and Nationality Act. Scroll down to Title III. This is document that the USCIS (formerly INS) and State Department use to determine citizenship eligibility. Enjoy!

However, it is a common misconception that McCain’s birth in the Canal Zone, or on a US military base, had anything to do with his qualifying for US citizenship. While the Canal Zone was administered by the US, it remained technically part of Panama and not US territory. Being born in the Canal Zone by itself did not confer US citizenship; there were a number of small towns inhabited by Panamanians within the boundaries of the Zone, and those born there had no rights to citizenship. McCain’s citizenship was due entirely to the fact that his parents were US citizens; he would have had exactly the same claim if he had been born in Peru.

The one way in which the Zone differed from the US with regard to citizenship is that citizen parents never had to live in the US in order to confer US citizenship on their children. So in the Zone, it was possible to have several generations of US citizens who had never lived in the US. My girlfriend when I first came to Panama was a third-generation Zonian, and a US citizen although I don’t think her parents had ever lived there.

This was under the old law. War babies who could prove their fathers were Americans were citizens. This is a bit different because at the time displaced persons were allowed to immigrate and the restrictions on immigrants weren’t so much.

In other words it wasn’t a big deal

In the Korean War came the exception. This appears to be racially motovated. It basically said, that if a baby had an American mother and a Korean (or other) father, the child was American.

But if the mother was Korean (or other) and the father was American then it wasn’t so. The father would have to accept responsiblity for the child and there was paperwork to fill out. If these conditions were met, then the baby was an American citizen. It also applied for the Vietnam War.

Critics charged racism as the government seemed fine with European War babies but not Asian War babies.

As others have noted the laws have changed since.

Question, do you know, did the WWII rules apply to the Pacific theater? I can’t imagine there weren’t some Philippine, Okinawan, Chinese, etc. war babies. Were they treated differently from the European babies?

It should also be noted that certain foreign countries also place their own restrictions on babies of mixed foreign/native parentage, especially countries that don’t recognize dual citizenship (China, for example).

Actually, his having been born in the Canal Zone makes his claim weaker, not stronger. The law at the time of McCain’s birth provided for children born on US territory, and also provided for children of Americans born outside of US jurisdiction, but didn’t actually say anything about children born under US jurisdiction but outside of US territory (as McCain himself was). A few years after McCain was born, a law was passed to close that loophole retroactively, but then you get the question of whether it’s legitimate for a law to grant natural-born citizenship retroactively.

They are natural born citizens. the only way they would not be is if they denounce their citizenship by claiming to be citizens of the country they were born in or the country of the non US parent.

Sorry but that was what was I learned in school years ago.

I’m willing to believe that racism could have played a role here, but it’s not obvious to me that this distinction made between children of American mothers and children of American fathers is race-based rather than gender-based. I mean, after all, it’s usually a lot harder to misidentify a child’s mother than its father.

So it seems to me that if an American woman overseas is said to be the mother of a new baby, then she probably is, and her parenthood can probably be easily corroborated by evidence. But if an American man overseas is said to be the father of a new baby, that’s much harder to prove.

So why wouldn’t it make sense to have a gender-differentiated system of recognizing parentage, where recognition of fatherhood requires formal and official acknowledgement by the man in question, while recognition of motherhood requires a lot less red tape?

Actually, the case is that some countries do not recognize dual citizenship (for example, China) and others actively discourages it (for example, USA). But if a child has an American parent that meets the residency requirements, it has no bearing on the natural born citizen (from a US government point of view) and that child is still a natural born US citizen.

[hijack]Specifically for China, in the case of a Chinese Mother/American Father, the child born in China is a natural born citizen of China. One then applies for a Consular Report of Birth Abroad from the US Consulate, and then can obtain a US passport. China has passport controls to leave the country, and the child has to leave on a Chinese passport with a visa to somewhere. If going to the US, you have to get a pro-forma visa. (US consulate will grant something that looks like a real US visa, but it’s not and only used to exit China. This is because a US citizen by definition does not need a US visa and will not be granted a real one. Generally the US consulate only give a pro-forma visa once and makes things pretty miserable if you try it a second time with the same kid) Then the child enters the US using the US passport. China will still consider the child a Chinese citizen unless the parent formally gives that up at a Chinese consulate. [/hijack]

A previous thread on this issue:

Well at least one statesman did not get citizenship despite having an undeniably American parent. I am of course talking about Winston S Churchill, I hear he reached pretty high in the United Kingdom instead.

This is not true. The US State Department doesn’t necessarily like it, but it is legal under US law for a child to have US citizenship and one or more other citizenships from birth. To take the example of my own children: because I am a US citizen and met the residency requirements, the children acquired US citizenship at birth. Because their father is a Norwegian citizen and we were married at the time of their birth (and incidentally still are), they acquired Norwegian citizenship at birth. They can claim US citizenship without renouncing their claim on Norwegian citizenship and vice-versa. And they have both citizenships, and both passports. It’s all legal.

Basically, once acquired, US citizenship is hard to lose and almost impossible to lose unintentionally. Nothing a child can do would cut it.

Please note that I made a mistake when I described current law about the situation above! Children born outside the US to two US citizens automatically acquire US citizenship if at least one parents has resided in the US for any length of time. In general the State Dept doesn’t count childhood visits to the grandparents as “residence”, but a semester at a US college for instance would probably count.