So which is Cruz? Is he a native or natural-born citizen OR is he an alien or foreigner?
Before the passage of the 14th Amendment, which was the context of the decision in Minor v. Happersett, Cruz would have been an alien. Since he was born after 1867, he is naturalized citizen, like Obama, because his mother was a citizen. Obama’s clever ploy, depending upon the ignorance of most citizens, was to use the 14th Amendment term “Native-born citizen of the US” to define his own status. A “Native-born citizen” is a naturalized citizen, naturalized by the 14th Amendment. Our legislators and media continue either to misdirect the public, or show their ignorance, when they assert that being “native-born” makes one a citizen. Had they even read the 14th Amendment the exclusion of “native-born” American Indians who pay no taxes from citizenship would have informed them. It was about sole allegiance to our Constitution, as explained by the principal author of the 14th Amendment, who explained to the congress ratifying the 14 that “every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen.”
What too few understand is that when the framers were constructing our Constitution we were twelve sovereign states, each with its own code for what constituted a citizen. For the Constitution to have defined who was a citizen would have potentially disenfranchised numbers of residents of states, and might also have required the resolution of the citizenship of slaves and American Indians. The framers “punted” naturalized citizenship when they wrote in Article I Section 8 that Congress will create an Uniform Rule for Naturalization.
Chief Justice Waite argued that being a natural born citizen implied being also a citizen. The Constitution only specified the never doubted common-law definition of natural born citizen because it was agreed, after John Jay's letter to Washington, that the President on only the President needed to be natural born. Virginia Minor was also natural born, and thus a citizen, the only citizen defined in the Constitution before the 14th Amendment.