Our National Legislature indulged the foreign-born child with presumptive citizenship, subject to subsequent satisfaction of a reasonable residence requirement, rather than to deny him citizenship outright, as concededly it had the power to do, and relegate the child, if he desired American citizenship, to the more arduous requirements of the usual naturalization process.If, as SCOTUS suggests, statutory citizenship at birth is a Congressional generosity and such persons have no constitutional right to their citizenship, then their citizenship can be revoked without their consent by a mere act of Congress. The same is not true of 14th Amendment citizens.(...)
The proper emphasis is on what the statute permits him to gain from the possible starting point of noncitizenship, not on what he claims to lose from the possible starting point of full citizenship to which he has no constitutional right in the first place.
I really, really like Ted Cruz. It bothers me that his citizenship is dependent upon the whims of Congress. Political tides rise and fall. It was not long ago that Senator Lindsey Graham suggested that Congress revoke the citizenship rights of those born on U.S. soil to illegal aliens.
What State were you born in?
Unless you were born in one of the thirteen original states, your citizenship is a result of an act of Congress.
Let's say you were born in California, for example. None of the people of California were United States citizens before an act of Congress made them that way.
In fact, this covers most of the population of the United States. More than two-thirds of Americans - including everybody born in the State of Texas - were made citizens by an Act of Congress.
Not having studied the particular case in depth, my take is the court was saying the case needed to be decided on what, exactly, the statute gave to the petitioner but the petitioner was trying to claim he was 'losing' something based on a citizenship to which he was never originally entitled.
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Not to mention there is not a single shred of evidence in the Founding ear to support the authority for a 'presumptive citizenship'.