The law tells you who is a citizen at birth. The Constitution is the only place that uses “natural born citizen.”
Again, who is a citizen at birth is set forth in the law (Section 1401).
That tells you what a child’s citizenship status is at the moment of birth.
That’s it. There is nothing else. No secret provision somewhere. Just the U.S. law about who is a citizen at birth. All of it.
I did make an error, though, in the way I put it. If two parents are U.S. citizens and a child is born abroad, the child is a natural born citizen WITHOUT QUESTION. If one parent is a U.S. citizen only, the child MIGHT BE a natural born citizen, but it depends on the age of that parent.
Just read the law. Remember that you will not find “natural born citizen” anywhere but in the Constitution and in Supreme Court decisions, but also remember that those Supreme Court decisions never intended to be DEFINING what natural born citizen meant — they were simply using the term.
In 1961, the law was virtually as it is today. There was only a minor difference.
This page is from the American Citizens Abroad website and gives pertinent information about the law over time: http://www.aca.ch/hisuscit.htm
It is here I would also like to point out, while there may be statutory definitions, as well as regulatory definitions, of what a "natural born" citizen is. We are only interested in the Constitutional definition of what a "natural born" U.S. citizen as it pertains to Article ll, Section l, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution.
I will agree with you, the Constitution doesn't actually define what a natural born U.S. citizen is, it is for that reason we must go to the writers' original intent. As to their original intent, we can start by looking at the way they constructed Article ll, Section l, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution: "No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."
Since the writers of Clause 5 clearly differentiated between a "...natural born Citizen or a Citizen of the United States"... by using the coordinating conjunction "or", we can safely assume the two terms were seen by the writer's of the Clause 5 as different. If the two terms were seen by the writers of Clause 5 as the same, there would have been no need to place any coordinating conjunction there at all.
Moreover, the second part of this sentence: "...or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President"... was clearly meant to be the grandfather clause, allowing those who were merely U.S. citizens, but not "natural born" citizens at the time of adoption of the Constitution, to be eligible to the Office of President as well. We can further assume that "natural born" was something more special by way of citizenship than by simply being a citizen by the construct of this phrase.
So what was the difference between a U.S. Citizen and a "natural born" U.S. Citizen the writers of Article ll, Section l, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution had in mind when they constructed this sentence?
Can there really be any other meaning to a "natural born" citizen, as it pertains to Article ll, Section l, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution, than a person born of two U.S. Citizen parents?
ex animo
davidfarrar