Folks can argue over the definition of the phrase, Natural Born Citizen, but the fact is, there is a condition of group membership that the Framers were attempting to codify in the US Constitution in Article II, Section I, by using that phrase.
They wanted to protect our country from ever having someone with divided loyalties from ever attaining the office of president (for obvious reasons).
To accomplish this, they set the bar for citizenship of president higher than for any other federal office named in the Constitution. Nowhere else in the Constitution will you find that a federal officer MUST be a Natural Born Citizen.
The Framers didn’t just pull that phrase out of thin air, either. That phrase was well known to educated people of the time, and it was universally understood to mean, one who is born on the soil of their country to two citizen parents of that same country.
It’s a simple concept, whose meaning has been muddied by time, and the corruption of our laws and language.
The original intent of the Framers has never been in question about this.
“The Framers didn’t just pull that phrase out of thin air, either. That phrase was well known to educated people of the time, and it was universally understood to mean, one who is born on the soil of their country to two citizen parents of that same country.”
Not true. The phrase NBC existed prior to the Constitution, and it existed as the American version of natural born subject. At independence, every NBS became a NBC.
Vattel never used the phrase ‘natural born citizen’, nor did the Founder’s use his phrase and require the President to be “indigenous”.