So what do birthers say when confronted with the fact that the U.S. considers the children of citizens to be naturally born citizens, (jus sanguinis) in other words, they don’t have to be “naturalized” in a separate process because they are automatically considered citizens at birth. That would mean that even if Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii, it would be a moot point since his mother was a citizen. I haven’t seen anything in the news addressing this issue. Has any journalist ever pointed this out to a “birther” talking head, and what was the response?
IIRC, wasn’t there some discussion whether a child born abroad to a woman of US citizenship would be an American citizen in those days? Vive la difference!
The birther’s response? Well look no further than Donald Trump’s response today when Obama showed his full official birth certificate - Basically “We’ll have to look at it carefully to see if it’s real.” The correlation of logic, law, and reality are irrelevant when one’s mind is made up.
They claim that both parents have to be US citizens, or that his mother hadn’t lived in the US long enough (or something like that). Of the first item, we have had at least 1 (and I think more) president who had one non-American born parent.
The issue is that Obama’s mother, although a citizen, was too young at the time of his birth to pass on her citizenship.
From here:
Obama’s mother was born November 29, 1942, and he was born on August 4, 1961. Since she was 18 at that time, she could not have been physically present in the US for five years after the age of fourteen and so could not pass on her citizenship.
There was, at the time, a quirk in the US law that would have made Obama not a citizen if he had been born in Kenya. Basically, the law required that the mother have lived in the US for some period of time (20 years?) and Obama’s mom wasn’t old enough to have lived anywhere that long.
The intent of the law, as I understand it, was to prevent the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of ex-pats from being citizens, which makes a kind of sense. Citizenship shouldn’t be transmitted through generations of people who have never been to a country. There are still laws in place that prevent this, but they have been amended so that kids in the sort of situation Obama would have been in had be been born overseas would have citizenship.
I didn’t know that. Thanks! That makes a lot of sense, and I was wondering what the purpose of that law was.
Interestingly, the Panama Canal Zone was one place where this provision was not in effect. US citizens living in the Canal Zone could pass on their citizenship indefinitely without ever having lived in or even visited the United States itself. (Contrary to some misconceptions about John McCain’s citizenship, birth in the Canal Zone by itself did not convey US citizenship. The Canal Zone remained technically part of Panama, although under US administration. McCain was a citizen because his parents were citizens, not because he was born in the Zone.)
And even if that wasn’t true about the Canal Zone, birth there wouldn’t necessarily result in citizenship. There is no constitutional right to citizenship as a result of birth in an unincorporated territory, as the Supreme Court has ruled the territories to be outside of the United States. (The last substantial incorporated territory was Hawaii. Puerto Ricans, Guamanians, etc. are only citizens because of the benevolence of a prior Congress. Even today, someone born in American Samoa is only a US citizen if they can find a jus sanguinis provision that applies to them.)
Actually, under the laws in effect at the time McCain was born, he fell through a loophole and did not have citizenship at the time of his birth. At the time, you could be a natural-born citizen by being born within the US, or by being born to American parents outside of US jurisdiction, but the law didn’t actually address someone born within American jurisdiction but outside the borders. Congress closed the loophole a few years later, though, and retroactively granted citizenship to all the children affected by it, so he’s still a citizen by virtue of his birth.
Bear in mind that “citizen” for purposes of citizenship law is not necessarily the same as “natural born citizen” as set forth in the Constitution. There’s never been a court case analyzing that provision, so no one really knows what “natural born citizen” means.
For instance, I was born overseas on a US military base to two US citizen parents. I am a citizen from birth, but am I a “natural born citizen”? Dunno.
True, but that doesn’t doesn’t stop birthers from claiming absolutely that the law requires both birth parents to be citizens for a U.S.-born baby to be a natural born citizen, which they always abbreviate NBC.
What law? Doesn’t matter. As long as they claim there’s a law, Obama fails it.
They also claim that because Obama’s father was Kenyan, our Barack has dual citizenship, which disqualifies him. This is also absolute according to their law.
And of course, the documentation was forged. All of it, including the new one.
If that is true, then perhaps the intent of the law was that it only applies to “naturalized” citizens, in other words, people who moved here from somewhere else. It’s non-sensical when applied to someone who always “lived” in the U.S.
I always thought that “citizen by birth” and natural born citizen are the same thing, as opposed to someone who becomes “naturalized” through a specific process and renounces some other citizenship to become a citizen.
Since a “natural born” citizen does not have to go through any process to “become” a citizen, it also allows them to have dual citizenship in some cases.
It of course wouldn’t apply to someone who’s always lived here , but it would apply to plenty of people who weren’t naturalized. For example, my American citizen uncle moved to another country with his wife and American citizen son . While there, they had a daughter ( also an American citizen). If they had staed abroad, my cousins would not have met the requirements to pass on their citizenship.
And there is some sense to that: how many people in, say, Liberia, don’t have one out of 16 great-great grandparents who was born in the United States? Citizenship of freed slaves is a little murky, of course (Dred Scott rears it’s head), but if citizenship passes immortally, you would have an interesting argument.
People born to US citizens outside the US face all kinds of weird situations. A fellow I know was born in Saudi Arabia to US parents. By the time he was of voting age, he had never lived in the USA and thus had no state of residence (Virginia, the state of his parent’s former residence does not grant such residency to children born outside the state)… so he could not vote, even though he was required to pay tax to the US on his income earned in Saudi. And no income exclusion since the Embassy is considered US soil. Not sure if he could ever be President.
For another conundrum, try to figure out how George Washington could have been a natural born citizen of a country that did not exist when he was born.
They had that covered:
Presumably General Washington was regarded as a “Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution”, since he had been born in Virginia and lived all his life in what were to become the United States, as well as leading its army. Of course, Great Britain regarded him as a British subject (even if a traitorous one), and would have welcomed him back in England or Canada, before executing him for treason – so in modern terms, he was a dual citizen.
I think most people would consider natural born citizen and citizen by birth to be synonymous–but not birthers. The 14th amendment to the constitution starts out “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens…” which seems to leave out persons born outside the US and never naturalized. Persons like McCain. The following clause excludes children who are born under diplomatic immunity and was intended only for that purpose.
I have a question on this subject.
Let’s consider, for the sake of argument, that the Birthers are right in that, in a very specific time window, Obama could not have gotten American citizenship from his mother. Since then, I guess there must have been corrections to those citizenship rules (remember that one of the reasons why this natural born citizenship is so complicated is because the courts had to bend over backwards to deny citizenship for blacks. Civil rights have been there for some time now, I would tend to assume that the citizenship rules have relaxed a bit since Obama’s birth).
Do actual interpretations or laws would consider that if Obama had been born in the very same circumstances, he would be a natural born citizen, no problem? And, if so, doesnt that mean that Obama himself benefits from that? You know, new law trumps the old one?