I worded my response the way I did in order to avoid going down a side issue, but it didn’t work.
What you are saying is absolutely true. It’s also completely irrelevant. The reason why you were wrong about Kai-shek is because the government that he lead is the ONLY legitimate government of ALL of China. The Chinese Communists are nothing more than mostly-successful rebels against that government. It doesn’t matter how many nations recognize the mainland government–it still remains illegitimate.
The constitution doesn’t define what “natural-born citizen” means. You think you know what it means and I think I know what it means but there’s no specific definition given.
John McCain is a US citizen whose citizenship is based on the circumstances of his birth, but on the day he was born he was not a US citizen. Citizenship for babies like him was granted (retroactively) two years later. IMHO, this could fall outside the definition of “natural-born citizen”. It’s enough of a controversy that Congress felt it necessary to issue a declaration stating that John McCain is eligible to be President.
Ted Cruz was a US citizen on the day he was born, which is one way of interpreting “natural-born citizen”. But another way to interpret it is that anyone who chooses, as an adult, to become an American, is not a “natural-born citizen”. Therefore, a child who grows up with dual citizenship, Canadian and American, and then as an adult gets to choose which of these two citizenships to keep and which one to discard, would not be eligible to be POTUS. Does Ted Cruz fall into that category?
You don’t have to choose between the two citizenships upon adulthood; some countries have such laws, but neither the US nor Canada does. Sen. Cruz only renounced his Canadian citizenship for political reasons, saying “As a U.S. senator, I believe I should be only an American.” So no, Senator Cruz would not fall into that category, in the sense that he didn’t have to choose between his citizenships; and he didn’t certainly choose to become an American citizen, he was born that way.
That’s true now, but it wasn’t true at the time Ted Cruz was born. At that time, US law did not permit US citizens to have dual citizenship with another country.
I didn’t say “have to choose”. I said “gets to choose”. Cruz had the choice to be Canadian or to be American or to do nothing and retain dual citizenship, and he CHOSE to be an American.
For the record, I’m not claiming that Ted Cruz is ineligible to be POTUS. I’m just pointing out that the situation isn’t black and white. There’s a lot of grey. There’s more than one way to define “natural-born citizen” and the US constitution does not explain what the authors meant.
The US didn’t have a law that forbade US citizens from having dual citizenship, and for all practical purposes this would have been unenforceable law anyway, because the U.S. can’t control the operation of other countries’ laws.
For example, until the 1870s it was not possible under British law to renounce British citizenship. If a person was born a subject of the British crown and had no way to get rid of this “extra” citizenship (a renunciation in an American court was null and void as far as the Brits were concerned, which was a factor in the War of 1812), how could the U.S. hold it against them? Argentina, to name another, forbade renunciation of citizenship at least into the 1980s, and may still have that law.
The U.S. did not recognize dual citizenship for most of its history, and there were a series of treaties (the Bancroft treaties) and statutes providing for the conditions under which somebody could lose U.S. citizenship, but most of these were swept away by the Supreme Court’s decision in Afroyim v. Rusk, decided in 1967. (Cruz was born in 1970.) However, failure to recognize is not the same as not permitting.
Hmm. I could have sworn that the latest change in the US’s dual-citizenship policy was in 2005. Perhaps I was remembering something else. I distinctly remember talking to someone in 1996 who told me he was hoping to have dual citizenship in the US and… I wanna say it was Switzerland? Perhaps the problem lay not in the mere fact that he want to be both Swiss and American at the same time but in the fact that US law forbade serving in the military of another country and Swiss law required military service of all citizens. It looks like I got those two issues mixed up.
I believe this discussion has a couple of underlying false assumptions, perhaps a result of some of you trying to look at the rest of the world as if it were like the US:
The US is one of very few countries where place of birth has anything to do with citizenship. For most countries, a child’s citizenship depends on the parents’ citizenship and place of birth is usually irrelevant. Being born outside of a country of citizenship is therefore not of any significance for most other countries.
The US is also one of very few countries where there’s a place of birth requirement to be a political leader. Elsewhere, it’s mostly just a citizenship requirement, and citizenship can change.
In an increasingly mobile world, there’s really nothing too unusual about circumstances that meet the question asked
You are right that the situation is complicated but this part is not correct. As the US does not recognize Taiwan as an official country on paper the countries do not trade ambassadors or have official embassies or consulates. Instead the have such things as the American Institute in Tawan, where I go to have my own and my children’s passports renewed.
It’s all part of the legal fiction that there is only one China which no one but a few hard core diehards in Beijing believe.
The point you were responding to was absolutely incorrect. Taiwan is in no way part of China.
Well, in the context of this thread, it’s more complicated than that.
When Chiang Kai-Shek rose to power in the Republic of China, the territory of the Republic, both legally and de facto, included the place where he was born.
Subsequently, a rival polity, the PRC, acquired power in most of China, including the place where Chiang was born. What we then had was a country with two rival governments, each controlling a different part of the national territory.
The OP asks about leaders “not born in the nation they lead”. Whatever the formal positions of the leadership on both sides, the Chinese situation fairly soon developed into a case of two states, each claiming to be the political embodiment of the Chinese nation, and each claiming jurisdiction over the territory of the other - claims which they still both formally maintain, SFAIK. But, if a nation is defined ethnically, culturally, linguistically, etc there was and still is only one Chinese nation. The questions is not whether Chiang was born outside the Chinese nation - he certainly was not - but whether he was the leader of that nation. He claimed to be, but in reality, after 1949, he had been largely displaced from that position. His claim to leadership remained effective only in Taiwan, and he was not born in Taiwan. But to his dying day he regarded himself not as the leader of Taiwan, but as the leader of China.
Of course, but I wasn’t responding to that. I was addressing two points. First, that Horatio Hellpop was mistaken that the US and Taiwan traded ambassadors and had consulates in each other’s countries and then to agree that currently there is no way that Taiwan can be considered a part of China now.
Taiwan is not part of the PRC, obviously, despite the PRC’s formal claims. But is it part of the geographic, cultural, ethnic, historical entity that we know as China? Yes. Are Taiwanese citizens of the RoC part of the Chinese nation? Yes. And the OP asks about people born in the nation that they lead. Chian was certainly born in the Chinese nation, which is the only nation that he ever led, albeit that he didn’t really lead it in any substantial way after 1949.
Taiwan is not part of the PRC, obviously, despite the PRC’s formal claims. But is it part of the geographic, cultural, ethnic, historical entity that we know as China? Yes. Are Taiwanese citizens of the RoC part of the Chinese nation? Yes. And the OP asks about people born in the nation that they lead. Chiang was certainly born in the Chinese nation, which is the only nation that he ever led, albeit that he didn’t really lead it in any substantial way after 1949.
One of “few” perhaps but not “very few”. Canada has jus soli too… The United States is joined by Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, along with nearly every country in Central and South America
In other words, in general- the New World has jus soli and the Old World doesn’t.
But even in the Old World they have a form of it:" Many European countries still maintain a version of birthright citizenship, however. In Germany and the United Kingdom, citizenship is now automatically granted to a person if at least one of his or her parents is a citizen or permanent resident."
