At the time of the Revolution the common law of England was “thrown off”..oh sure, some individual states still adhered to it. That was the only law they knew and there was no central government in place yet.
So then the country loosely followed the Articles of Confederation prior to the construction of the Constitution.
Also prior to the Revolution and the Constitution, each state retained it’s own laws on naturalizing citizens. So, basically you were a subject of England but a citizen of a particular colony/state. If you emigrated from a different country and wished to become a citizen, you became a citizen of a state under their own requirements - those varied from state to state. There was no uniform law on naturalization in this country prior to the Constitution.
Being a sovereign nation, our new government looked to international law. On the topic of allegiance English law may have been referenced, but then again so was Roman, as was French. A lot of sorting out had to be done - necessarily - for a full generation after the Constitution. The only time the question of allegiance did not arise was to children born in the US to citizen parentS. A child born to a alien Father, citizen mother may not be able to inherit property through the mother because she took on the nationality of her alien husband at marriage. That had to be addressed so that children of such marriages wouldn’t be disinherited.
BTW, you posted snips, carefully selected snips. Like you left this off;
“The state of the law in the United States is easily
deduced. -The notion that there is any common law
principle to naturalize the children born in foreign
countries, of native-born American father and mother,
father or mother, must be discarded. There is not and
never was any such common law principle.”
That snip asserts that there was NO common law principle or law, prior to all of the Acts that were later passed. The first Act upon this subject was passed in March, 1790. After the Constitution was signed.
That is quite straightforward.
Cruz was born a dual citizen, both American and Canadian. His class of citizenship did not even exist in 1787. Period. I forget what year the Act was passed that gave the U.S. MOTHER the right to pass U.S. citizenship to her child born on foreign land, but prior to that Act it had to be through the Father, and he had to have been a resident of the U.S. Oh, and that child had to declare allegiance at the age of majority. Those Acts don’t make a foreign born US citizen into a natural born citizen, but it gave them the same rights AS a natural born citizen.
And Article ll was NEVER amended. To this day dual citizenship is still not officially recognized in the US.
I would say it isn't addressed by our nationality laws rather than it isn't recognized in U.S.
SCOTUS recognized the concept of dual nationality in Kawakita v. United States.
From the State Department's Foreign Affairs manual:
7 FAM 082 DUAL NATIONALITY AND U.S. LAW -- GENERALLY(CT:CON-106; 06-06-2005)
Current U.S. nationality laws do not explicitly address dual nationality, but the U.S. Supreme Court has stated that dual nationality is a “status long recognized in the law” and that “a person may have and exercise rights of nationality in two countries and be subject to the responsibilities of both.” See Kawakita v. United States, 343 U.S. 717 (1952).
“At the time of the Revolution the common law of England was “thrown off”..oh sure, some individual states still adhered to it. That was the only law they knew and there was no central government in place yet...”
No. We are still a common law country. That is why court cases matter. Our common law began to diverge from Great Britain with independence, but we were and remain a common law country.
“Being a sovereign nation, our new government looked to international law.”
Nope. On the matter of citizenship, we have always been a ‘birth in the US’ sort of place. The losers in the WKA case argued that a century of common law should have been overturned and that the US should use roman law as its basis, and that idea was laughed out of court.