[alancarp]

The law (since changed) that stated that since his mother was underage and abroad for sufficient time, his father's citizenship prevails. The best treatment of the subject that I've found is here - way too long to post, but the gist is that Ann Dunham didn't pass muster to be able to confer citizenship to Barry... no matter where he was born. For the record, I also don't believe the 14th Amendment was written to allow anchor babies).

My belief is that Mama Dunham got her own mother's help to establish baby Barak's birth certificate and social security card (believed to be a fraud, too, but that doesn't matter either for this discussion) and thus presented a plausible set of paperwork for US citizenship at the time. Nobody really cared until he started running for office.

[alancarp]

*correction: Not ‘abroad’, but “either abroad of simply too young to accumulate the required years”