A 2016 SCOTUS case was a result of this issue but the crux of the case was somewhat different. Immigration law at the time specified different residency requirements for men and women to be able to pass along citizenship to their children born outside the United States.
Luis Ramon Morales-Santana was born in the Dominican Republic to a US citizen father and a mother with citizenship from the Dominican Republic. His parents were not married. Immigration law at the time required an unwed US citizen father to have resided in the United States at least 10 years with at least 5 years after age 14 to be able to pass on US citizenship to his child. But an unwed US citizen mother need only have lived in the United States for 1 year to be able to pass on US citizenship to her child. Morales-Santana’s father fell 20 days short of the residency requirement.
Morales-Santana claimed US citizenship with mixed results in lower courts. Ultimately the case landed at the Supreme Court. In an 8-0 opinion Justice Ginsburg wrote that the differing requirements were “stunningly anachronistic.” But the high court’s decision was to impose the longer residency requirement regardless of the gender of the US citizen parent, effectively denying Morales-Santana’s claim of citizenship.
And presumably your mother had lived in the United States (or been posted overseas as a diplomat or member of the US armed forces) for the requisite period of time before your birth?
I know it comes as quite a surprise to many that in some circumstances the child of a US citizen might not gain US citizenship at birth but that is indeed the case. Rare but it does happen.
There is no fundamental constitutional principle that an American parent has an American child.
If you’re born outside of “the United States” (which is defined somewhat narrowly and doesn’t even include most territories), the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply and your citizenship is contingent on Congress declaring that someone born in your circumstances is a US citizen. As mentioned, even today there are US citizens who do not qualify to pass US citizenship to their children who are born abroad.
Actually, I don’t think I follow. I understand the argument that the initial focus on Obama’s eligibility was “racist.” That is that the only reason he was required to “prove” where he was born was because he was black or because he had a traditionally Arab middle name. I’ve expressed some doubt about that argument, but I understand it. I don’t think there was ever any reasonable argument that he was not born in Hawaii, so certainly I think that it should “have been it” when he released the documents. (That said, I have no objection to a requirement that all candidates for federal office prove their eligibility and, given the standing issues in challenging it after the fact, it might make sense for states to mandate that in order to be on the ballot).
But I’m not sure I not sure I see how continued belief in a debunked theory makes the argument more obviously racist. Unless the point is that the “reasonable doubter” were satisfied by the documents but the racist ones weren’t (so they continued to doubt), but I’m not sure why that is more likely than that some people are crazy conspiracy theorists and others are so partisan that they’ll believe anything about “the enemy”.
8 U.S.C. 1401 lists the criteria for citizenship at birth. I don’t think it’s been tested, but I think that most people agree that “citizens of the United States at birth” = “natural born citizen”
McCain was a natural born citizen under subsection (c) (“a person born outside of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents both of whom are citizens of the United States and one of whom has had a residence in the United States or one of its outlying possessions, prior to the birth of such person”). Now, I don’t know how the statute read in 1936, but given that a materially similar provision was included in the Naturalization Act of 1790, I find it unlikely that it was taken out and put back in (for reasons that, as I’ve said, McCain demonstrates: you can’t send military personnel or diplomats overseas in government service and strip their children born abroad of citizenship).
After McCain was born, Congress passed 8 USC 1403, which provides US citizen to people born in the Canal Zone “whose father or mother or both at the time of the birth of such person was or is a citizen of the United States.” Obviously 1403 overlaps somewhat with 1401, but the fact that McCain would qualify under either statute does not mean that he was not a citizen at birth under 1401.
With respect to Obama (assuming he had been born in Kenya) the current provision under 1401 would be subsection g (“a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years”). At the time of Obama’s birth, however, the subsection required 10 years residence in the United States including 5 after the age of 14. So because his mother was too young, Obama would have been ineligible. That said, when the statue was amended, it was made retroactive to December 1952, which would have covered Obama. I think it it is an interesting (but unresolved) question whether Congress can retroactively make someone a natural born citizen.
(On a related note, and I don’t have the statute, I do believe there may be different rules for bastard children (that favor the mother’s citizenship). Because the marriage was likely illegal, there is an argument that Barack Jr. was illegitimate and would qualify. That said, children of illegal marriages are generally treated as if they were legitimate under the law.)
OK, I don’t think we’ll come to agreement. It seems obvious to me that the continued “othering” of Obama through the birther conspiracy, using and capitalizing his Middle Eastern-sounding middle name, are obviously rooted in racism. There was no similar “othering” of Gore or Clinton. However, this is GD and I have no cites that can prove that birthers were predominantly racists, so I’ll quietly slip away.
That Obama’s citizenship was questioned is not, in of itself, a sign of racism.
That the question took hold and spread like wildfire and make people take license to * literally go apeshit* is what makes it clearly racist.
Point 1: Obama’s supposed citizenship was Kenyan. Making him one of those foreign African Kunte Kinte types with strange, primitive, un-American customs. You know, the type that simply doesn’t belong in the pristine White House. If the presumption was that Obama came from a western (i.e. white) country, like Germany or GB, there would have been zero outrage. Obama’s race and ethnicity, being stigmatized attributes, made for outrage that would’ve been absent if the “interloper” had been white. It takes a helluva a lot of naivety not to understand this.
Point 2: Hawaii was Obama’s birthplace. Hawaii isn’t exactly seen as good ole’ America by the racist crowd; it is half step away from being a foreign country in their eyes. I mean, have you see all the “foreigners” that live there? So a birth certificate from Hawaii is damn near worthless. Hawaii officials could’ve been bribed to doctor up anything Obama wanted because that’s how it’s done in the 3rd world.
Arthur’s father was Irish, and the claim was he was born there. While never considered “non-white” (as some have claimed) Irish ethnicity was clearly considered inferior to other Norther European ethnic groups. Neither Obama or Arthur would have faced those allegations if their fathers were from England.
Thing is that after years of discussions and looking at history I can say that racism is actually made of several virulent forms of ignorance. And fake information.
I also noted that, even in this board, I saw people that started or concurrently had fallen for conspiracy theories related to anti science (the most common one: denial of climate science) but then I noticed a worrisome “development”: when later they appeared as not only being believers of that CT, but to also be followers of “scientific” racism and even reveal themselves as being holocaust deniers, among other ugly things.
What I notice from birthers and other CTs is a lot of what generalists call “crank magnetism”. They are like people that are not happy with having just one Frito chip, they can’t have just one ignorant blind spot so they fall for many of them.
And many ignorants out there do fall for CTs that tell them what they wanted to hear about immigrants or minorities. So, unfortunately I have to tell you that it is indeed not obvious at all that following conspiracy theories insulates their believers from racism. In reality it makes many of the ones that are prone to fall for conspiracy theories to be easier targets of the fake news that are not only pushing anti-science, but bigotry as well.
So it is easier for demagogues to lead conspiracy theorists to swallow conspiracies about academics or the media “not telling the truth” by “them” hiding inconvenient “truths” about minorities. Birtherism is but one fake conspiracy among the many that demagogues, like the president, are *still *pushing.
Not to belabor the point, but while Hinman originally suggested that Arthur had been born in Ireland, the “birther” conspiracy (to the extent that others believed, including, as I understand it, Samuel Tilden) related to the claim that he had been born during a visit to his mother’s family in Canada. Hinman’s treatise, for example, focused on the Canada theory. It may be that, absent the Ireland angle, Hinman would not have latched on to the Canada angle. (I also note again that Arthur’s father was born in Ireland, but was of Scottish/English descent, i.e. grandfather Gavin MacArthur was understood to be a Scot. But I’ve never really understood the line drawing of the British Isles).
I certainly did not intend to suggest that being a conspiracy theorist “insulated” anyone from racism. There are racists and some of them are likely to be conspiracy theorist. But, some people seem to be attracted to conspiracy theories and those people seem generally immune to debunking (and that this phenomena crosses racial and party lines). Which I think what you’re calling “crank magnetism”.
I’m not sure I fully follow the rest of your post, which I read as arguing that racists are particularly prone to conspiracy theories or that conspiracy theories are often directed at immigrants or minorities. The latter seems to me inconsistent with respect to the big conspiracy theories that I’m aware of which tend to focus on believing that the government is behind something evil or significant. I could believe the former proposition.
Want to make this more complicated? At the time of Obama’s birth, a child of an unmarried couple received the mother’s citizenship by law and independent of any other law such as the one you mentioned. It can be argued that since Ann Dunham’s marriage to Barack Obama Sr. was invalid (he was a bigamist) that under the law they were unmarried and Barack Obama Jr. was a NBC regardless of whether he was born in Kenya or Honolulu and despite his mother’s age.
You are missing the point a bit, I mentioned that since racism is a form of ignorance it does follow that some elements (like birtherism) are also items that demonstrate the ignorance of some, to me racism is composed of several ignorant bits. Birtherism is an item that racists use, if someone just follows that item by itself; then that someone can plausibly tell us that they are not racist, like the president attempts to do. But that is not the only item one relies to conclude that some people, like the president, are racist or panderers of them.
As for your point that big conspiracy theories are not really directed at immigrants or minorities, you are not much into history, uh?
BTW no, I’m not saying that CTs related to minorities are the most abundant. Only that they are also part [del]of a complete breakfast of nuts[/del] of the repertoire of bigots.
Imagine a white Obama—fathered by a white European but born to a white American mother. Are you saying we have every reason to assume he’d have been subject to as much (if not more) birther obsession as black Obama of Kenyan descent? Even if white Obama was born in a solidly white state like Texas or Iowa, instead some brown folk island in the Pacific? To believe racism wasn’t at play, you have to say yes to this question. Are you?
Well, I said something very similar to that in post 24, so I guess the answer to at last some of that is “yes”. Except… I did not say nor did I mean to imply in that post that the intensity would be at or above the level directed at Obama. I have said several times that I think racism plays a part in the Obama situation, so the implication would be that the intensity level would be lower (assuming no racism or less racism in the scenario I briefly outlined in post #24.)
I specifically made the subject of my hypothetical a Democrat because I think the Republicans are more prone to this sort of negative “fake news” messaging than the Democrats are. Not to say the Dems are completely immune, but they do seem to have more of a sense of shame than the GOP does.
You’re overlooking the obvious here (and so did the person you responded to): Obama’s black phenotype creates a need for a “visible reminder of his Americanness”. If he was blonde and blue-eyed, he’d look American enough to the masses, precluding any need to trot out a “visibly American” mother (which is just another way of saying white, right?).
I’ve said this before in discussions about Obama. I don’t recall any other presidential candidate in my lifetime (other than GWB perhaps) whose parentage and grandparentage received as much attention as Obama’s. When you get down to it, his electability hinged on how well white Americans were assured he’s “one of us” and the fact that he was raised by white people was critical to getting that reassurance. If he had not made a point of putting his grandparents and mother in the spotlight, his blackness would have been more of a liability.
So I disagree that there weren’t enough “visible reminders of his Americanness”. Even with a dead mother, we were treated to plenty pictures and stories about the “bonafide Americans’ in his family. And it still wasn’t enough because his skin had the audacity to be brown.
The intensity is not a trifling detail. The reason there was a Birther movement is because people could.not.let.it.go. If you believe racism has something to do with the intensity of this issue, then you believe Birtherism is at its core racist. Even if you think partisanship is a component of it.
I don’t think Birtherism is meaningfully characterized without reference to the people who believe(d) it. So, “at it’s core” is going to be different for different people. For many, maybe even most, people racism was probably at the core. For others, it could be partisanship or whatever Rush Limbaugh told them to believe. (And I use RL as a placeholder for anyone pushing the idea.)
As for the “Americanness” response, you only included part of my quote there, with nothing about his father, which I think was as important if not more so than his mother. But we’ve had other black presidential candidates before, and they didn’t have their Americanness questioned, so I’m not seeing Obama’s case as being necessarily one of racism. And there have been black Mayors and Governors who were not subject to Birtherism, either. My point is that with Obama you had a certain “opportunity” that didn’t show itself with other Democratic nominees in the recent past. The foreign sounding name. The foreign father who died back in the foreign land. Who were his American relatives who appeared with him on stage? I don’t recall seeing much of his half-sister Maya Kasandra Soetoro-Ng, but I don’t think she would have helped much in that department with the Birthers. (And I don’t think a lot of anti-Obama Republicans spent much time flipping through his family photo album.)
Suppose that in 2020 someone like Cory Booker or Duval Patrick. gets the Democratic nomination. That is, one of them is not just a major party wannabe, but a major party nominee. If there is no Birther movement rising up to confront either of them, will that change your mind at all about the situation with Obama? If there is one, it will change my mind. Not that I think the Obama Birther movement is devoid of racism-- far from it. I’m just disputing that it must be racism or that it can only be racism.
Why do you think that? It’s like saying Flat Earthers can’t meaningfully be characterized as a group. I feel comfortable in characterizing such believers as anti-science nutters, even though there’s a remote chance some are less insanely irrational than others.
Just wondering if you know anyone who still till this day insists Obama is Kenyan, who you would not consider racist.
At the risk of being Captain Obvious, anyone who lets RL tell them what to believe is likely racist.
Non-racist people can’t stomach RL types for very long, not because they are intellectually superior but because RL caters to fucking racists. He dog whistles, he vilifies progressives, and he acts like white men are the most oppressed group in the history of the country. He exploits racism, so it makes sense that “Obama is a secret Kenyan mooslim” would be a message he (and other loudmouths like him) would peddle to a racist crowd.
This is not how you judge whether something is racist. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson’s backgrounds didn’t lend themselves to being exploited the way that Obama’s was, but that doesn’t mean we can rule out racism in the latter’s case. I mean, that’s like saying that because there are a decent number of black people out there who have never been followed around in a store, we can’t conclude racism was involved in very specific case of such, even if we have other lines of evidence to go by. We’re not looking at Obama’s situation in a vacuum but rather in the context of other things said about him.
I don’t disagree with you that Obama’s name and background opened him up to birther attacks. That’s not really disputable. I just think him being of African descent gave the issue its sticking power and outrage.
No because I don’t think this is the right comparison to be making. You should be asking would I re-examine my opinion if birthers attacked a white Democratic candidate who had a name and background that made it easy to question their citizenship. (And they can’t be Latino…because in this country, people still consider white and Latino mutually exclusive categories.)
I would reassess my opinion if we saw something like this happen to a white candidate.