[BladeBryan]

"Having studied this passage for over 2 years I am not sure as to what the relevance of the repeated passage is."

The relevance is that in Minor the Court explicitly declined to resolve the doubts. Universal agreement that children born on U.S. soil to citizen parents are natural-born citizens does not imply that other classes are *not* natural-born citizens.

For the native-born, the doubts were decisively resolved in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (169 U.S. 649):

It thus clearly appears that, by the law of England for the last three centuries, beginning before the settlement of this country and continuing to the present day, aliens, while residing in the dominions possessed by the Crown of England, were within the allegiance, the obedience, the faith or loyalty, the protection, the power, the jurisdiction of the English Sovereign, and therefore every child born in England of alien parents was a natural-born subject unless the child of an ambassador or other diplomatic agent of a foreign State or of an alien enemy in hostile occupation of the place where the child was born.

III. The same rule was in force in all the English Colonies upon this continent down to the time of the Declaration of Independence, and in the United States afterwards, and continued to prevail under the Constitution as originally established.

Got that? The British rule that, with narrow exceptions, the native-born child of aliens is a natural-born subject continued to prevail under our original Constitution. Supreme Court said so.

[sourcery]

Your quote from Wong Kim Ark does not say what you claim it does. The phrase it uses is "natural born subject." It uses that phrase for the very good reason that it's not ruling (making a precedential holding) about US law, rather is making a dictum about British law (about which it has no authority to rule precedentially.)

[sourcery]

The correct translation of "natural born subject" into American law is simply "citizen." So the Wong Kim Ark holding is that those born in the US are citizens. Which is precisely what the 14th Amendment says.

[sourcery]

If your out-of-context quote was actually a holding of the case, the court could have stopped right there. Why? Because as a “holding,” that statement would have been sufficient to find the petitioner was a citizen, without any need to make a “first instance” interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

The fact that it didn’t do any such thing proves your interpretation is wrong.

And the fact that Congress thought it could pass statutes that denied Citizenship based on race or nationality, and that such statutes had been on the books for many decades, proves that it was absolutely FALSE that “The same rule was in force in all the English Colonies upon this continent down to the time of the Declaration of Independence, and in the United States afterwards, and continued to prevail under the Constitution as originally established.”

If that was the prevaling, settled law, why was this case even in court?

[bluecat6]

WKA....seriously? This case has nothing to do with the definition of natural born Citizen.