1) you were born and were granted U.S. citizenship due to the circumstances of your birth.
2) you underwent some sort of ‘naturalization’ process to become a U.S. citizen.
Nobody argues that the second group are anything other than “naturalized U.S. citizens”. Yet there seems to be much confusion over the status of the first group. For myself it seems obvious that if you were a U.S. citizen merely by the natural act of being born you are a “natural born citizen” of the U.S.A.. Yet some people seem intent on carving out some sort of third type of U.S. citizenship, besides that of either being “natural born” or “naturalized”.
>>Yet some people seem intent on carving out some sort of third type of U.S. citizenship, besides that of either being “natural born” or “naturalized”. <<
It has already happened. That third type of citizenship is called “Kenyan” and is sufficient to hold the office of President of the United States.
I’m with you 100%. If you gained citizenship by virtue of simply being born, then you were born a US citizen. Naturally born. Not naturalized.
The Hugo Chavez example with Sarah Palin is the ultimate example of the fallacy of granted citizenship from a foreign nation. What another nation does should be immaterial as far as what WE do considering citizenship. Otherwise we’ve just handed every 2 bit dictator to choose our President simply by granting citizenship to every person they do NOT want to be elected.
Imagine if in the Republican primary Chavez granted citizenship to every person in the primary except, say, Mitt Romney. Would we then have a single available candidate for us to vote for?
The courts beg to differ. For Constitutional purposes, the Supreme Court has ruled that persons born outside the US, but citizens at birth via statue are "naturalized at birth". Why? Because Congress has power only to create a Uniform Rule of Naturalization. So anyone who is a citizen solely through the operation of a statute, must be naturalized. Although the statute law says they are not naturalized. The Constitution says they must be.
No statute attempt to say who is a Natural Born citizen. Even the 1790 statute which did contain the words Natural Born Citizen (the only statute law ever to do so) said that the children of citizens born abroad shall be *considered* as Natural Born Citizens. But in 1795, that law was repealed and replaces, and it still made those born abroad of US citizen parents citizens at birth, it did use the words "Natural Born".
While no one knows why "natural born" was left out of the 1795 and all later laws, I believe that they recognized that they had overstepped their bounds, or that is could be inferred that they had, in trying to redefine a Constitutional term.
What is interesting about all that is that in putting that into a statute, they were acknowledging that such persons were *not*, and are not natural born under the Constitution.
But as your two categories, yes there are only two ways, by birth or naturalization.