Two issues here: where you are born and to whom; and the issue of loyalty vs citizenship.
Let’s address the latter first, because that really hangs people up. Citizenship can be conferred automatically. We must never interpret the constitution to mean that no one with a dual citizenship is eligible. Tomorrow Jamaica could make a candidate a citizen and poof, his candidacy is over. Dual citizenship is thus meaningless as a disqualifier.
Hopefully it would be difficult in these technological times to hide that a candidate spent 5-10 years outside our country, voting, involved in his host country’s government. Even as an American citizen, one hopes that his loyalty would be questioned and he would not be chosen as a serious candidate. That would be an example of divided loyalty. Yes, president Obama is borderline on that account, and much of his past has been obscured.
Back to the first point: where you are born and to whom. In 1961, and possibly today (?), the law of the land was that an American woman giving birth outside the country had to have lived 5 years after the age of 15 in the USA to be able to confer her citizenship onto her baby. This is what birthers are all about.
We have never seen an actual, non-forged proof that Barack Obama was born in the USA.
When she was a 17 year old girl “in trouble,” in 1961 with a baby of a different race, she could easily have gone where her Seattle school chums in such positions went. They popped over the border into Canada to the unwed mother homes run by either the Salvation Army or the Catholic Church. Usually they gave the babies up for adoption. She was not old enough to confer citizenship.
She may have changed her mind about giving up her mixed race baby, because within a month of his birth, she was alone with a little baby she didn’t know how to care for, enrolled in the university in Seattle. (She was never seen pregnant in Hawaii. She never ever lived with Barack Obama Senior.).
These are the two different questions raised by foreign birth or loyalty.
Ted Cruz was born outside the country to a woman eligible to confer citizenship. As was John McCain. No one knows where Barack Obama was born, and that is all birthers want to know.
That's a straw man argument.
Heck, if you play that game, the U.S. could then turn around and make all Jamaican citizens, U.S. citizens. If such a thing were viable, it would have been done long ago, and the actions would have stood the test of time (See War of 1812).
Such a move would not be internationally recognized and therefore would be unenforceable, even inside Jamaica, which would find itself internationally isolated (in the very least) if it did try to enforce such action.
“Ted Cruz was born outside the country to a woman eligible to confer citizenship.”
Yes, this law is codified in the Immigration and Naturalization Act. The Immigration and Naturalization Act says Cruz is a citizen at birth because of his mother’s citizenship status and age at the time of his birth.
Congress is not authorized to codify any law or rule to establish a uniform rule on Natural born citizenship status, only immigration and naturalization. Consequently, Congressional authority to speak on citizenship status after a non-U.S born person becomes a U.S. Citizen is voided.
Furthermore, SCOTUS has opined natural born citizenship status “stands upon the footing of the native born.” Consequently, only a native born citizen could be a natural born citizen.
Please see my reply to another individual in which I explained that dual citizen status, strictly speaking, is not incompatible with natural-born citizen status. Natural-born citizen status sounds in natural law, and in the Law of Nations. Any country of whom an individual is a natural-born citizen status holds a superior ‘claim’, if you will, to any other sovereign nation, regardless of what Jamaica or some other country starved for solid citizens tries to do with its citizenship statutes.