Let me clarify. The US tolerates dual citizenship, and at times may actively discourage it.
I know from personal experience that the US embassy folks in Shanghai tolerated and were even accommodating of dual citizenship through about 2003, and then they were cough cough rat bastards cough cough. I gave up a year later, and gave up the PRC passports.
My husband is Australian and was granted his US citizenship a few years back and was NEVER required or asked to relinquish his Australian passport.
Our children have US passports but are also eligible to hold Australian passports. We let our son’s Russian passport expire, but he is still also considered a Russian citizen and we can apply for a Russian passport if needed. The idea that some countries don’t “recognize dual citizenship” is very murky and vague. One country (such as the US) has no say over whether another country can issue you a passport. My husband has 2 passports and I’m pretty sure that our son can legitimately have 3 passports… whether he is granted travel visas to particular places and what passport he is required to use varies depending on the country.
Somebody asked me a question recently which I didn’t know the answer to and I told them to check with a US immigration lawyer. This seems like a good place to ask it myself (hi, Eva Luna!).
The child in this case was born a US citizen and adopted by Irish parents. My guess was that if she had been born in the US, she would retain her US citizenship because the Constitution confers that at birth and no statute or international Convention can override it (I know there’s the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” clause, but the Supreme Court has strictly limited the situations that includes). However, in this case her US citizenship derived from one of her parents - she herself was born in Ireland. So did she lose it on her adoption?
OK, so a child born in Bezerkistan is adopted as an infant, and acquires immediate citizenship upon arrival in the US.
Thirty-five years later, she decides to run for President. Does she qualify?
While the definition of “natural-born” has never been quite settled, most authorities seem to agree that it means something like “if you were automatically a citizen at the moment of your birth, you qualify”. In the case of a foreign adoption, the concept seems to be, as noted above, that the child is grafted to the new family, and acquires all the family’s’ rights and privileges thereby.
If the family are citizens, does this make the adoptee “natural-born”?
I have absolutely no idea, and don’t know that the issue has ever been decided. If I had to take a guess, I’d say she lost her citizenship as a matter of law - in the opposite direction, children who gain U.S. citizenship by adoption cannot then turn around and file petitions for their birth parents.
If any adoptee can become president by nature of his parents being US Citizens - then in thory ANYONE can be president - as adult adoption are legal in some states. I could adopt Barack Obama and even if he was born in Kenya - he’d be a US Citizen. Doesn’t seem logical to me, but like you said - not much in the way of precedent.