Good. Like I said there are multiple versions by different authors. Personally, I consider Emmerich de Vattel to be the best one since it's the one most used in the Founding era.
James Kent apparently wasn't overly fond of Vattel, but even he admitted:
The most popular, and the most elegant writer on the law of nations, is Vattel, whose method has been greatly admired. He has been cited, for the last half century, more freely than any one of the public jurists; but he is very deficient in philosophical precision.
James Kent , 1826
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Vattel's work was titled The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law .
This what Vattel said about natural born citizenship:
§ 212. Citizens and natives.
The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its advantages. The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens. As the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights.
Book I / CHAP. XIX. - Of Our Native Country, and Several Things That Relate to It
As I'm sure you know, this particular snippit-
The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens. is repeated in several legal decisions as well.
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That's why, in my most honest opinion that there is only one way to acquire natural-born citizenship
You must inherit it from your parents.
And since it's a concept of Natural Law, there is nothing the government can do to change it.
Government can make all the rules they want to 'determine' or 'decide' if someone IS a citizen and put any kind of name on it they like.....but all those citizens can ever be are a type of naturalized citizen.
Those clever old Founders :-)
Well, several things about Vattel:
• He says in the Preliminaries to the book that “the Law of Nations is the science which teaches the rights subsisting *between nations or states*, and the obligations correspondent to those rights.” The emphasis is mine, to point out that the law of nations has to do with the interactions between nations, not the rules of what happens within a nation—like who’s eligible to be president.
• When Vattel does discuss internal issues, there’s no reason to think we follow him slavishly. For example, he proposes that “since it is an established custom that the nobility and military men should appear armed, even in time of peace, care should be taken to enforce a rigid observance of the laws which allow the privilege of wearing swords to these two orders of men only.” Obviously, we didn’t adopt that—there’s a lot else in there that most people on this board would find objectionable.
• He didn’t write “natives, or natural-born citizens,” of course, he wrote “les naturels, ou indigenes.” Just because some (but not all) translators later decided that the established English expression “natural-born citizen” was a good way to render “indigenes” doesn’t mean the Framers had that definition in mind.
• “Children” have “parents.” I’ve always thought the insistence that both parents be citizens based on his use of the plural was a really weak argument. If you’re talking about a nation’s children, you’re going to refer to their parents, even if you only mean one parent per child. Even later in that same quote, he says children follow the condition of their fathers—does that mean both fathers have to be citizens for a child to be NBC?
> That’s why, in my most honest opinion that there is only one way to
> acquire natural-born citizenship
> You must inherit it from your parents.
And it would have been so easy to just write that, wouldn’t it? Instead, they used this term that sounds so much like “natural-born subject,” whose definition did *not* require inheritance from parents.
Silly Founders.