I don’t understand why Obama’s mother’s citizenship wouldn’t transfer to Obama, if in fact she was a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth. Can you elucidate?
“I don’t understand why Obama’s mother’s citizenship wouldn’t transfer to Obama, if in fact she was a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth. Can you elucidate?”
Sure::
US Law clearly stipulates: “If only one parent was a U.S. citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least five of which had to be after the age of 16.”
Barack Obama’s father was not a U.S. citizen and Obama’s mother was only 18 when Obama was born, which means though she had been a U.S. citizen for 10 years, (or citizen perhaps because of Hawai’i being a territory) the mother fails the test for being so for at least 5 years prior to Barack Obama’s birth, but after age 16.
In essence, she was not old enough to qualify her son for automatic U.S. citizenship. At most, there were only 2 years elapsed since his mother turned 16 at the time of Barack Obama’s birth when she was 18 in Hawaii. His mother would have needed to have been 16+5= 21 years old, at the time of Barack Obama’s birth for him to have been a natural-born citizen. As aforementioned, she was a young college student at the time and was not. Barack Obama was already 3 years old at that time his mother would have needed to have waited to have him as the only U.S. Citizen parent. Obama instead should have been naturalized, but even then, that would still disqualify him from holding the office.