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sourcery wrote: "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."

That's not what the Court says:

"Natural-born British subject" means a British subject who has become a British subject at the moment of his birth. [U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, quoting A.V. Dicey's Digest of the Law of England]
The term "citizen," as understood in our law, is precisely analogous to the term "subject" in the common law, and the change of phrase has entirely resulted from the change of government. [U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, quoting State v. Manuel]
Subject and citizen are, in a degree, convertible terms as applied to natives, and though the term citizen seems to be appropriate to republican freemen, yet we are, equally with the inhabitants of all other countries, subjects, for we are equally bound by allegiance and subjection to the government and law of the land. [U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, quoting 2 Kent Com. (6th ed.)]

Sourcery, I don't know what kind of work you do, but it's clearly not legal scholarship. I'm not a constitutional scholar either, but I know enough to see that your analysis warrants a big red X through it. You are fooling people who want to be fooled, including yourself, but that's it.

It's clear you have no law degree, or you'd understand the difference between dicta and a holding. You'd also understand that the Wong Kim Ark Court would not have used the 14th Amendment to decide the issue before them, could they have reached the same result based solely on the idea that US Constitutional law grants citizenship based on inheriting the semantics of "natural born subject."

Also, it must be noted, that nowhere in Wong Kim Ark does the Court even emit dicta to the effect that a "natural born citizen" is anyone born in the US, who was "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" at birth. In fact, the term "natural born citizen" occurs nowhere in the opinion.

Y'all seem to keep forgetting that the issue isn't whether anyone is a citizen (which was the only issue in Wong Kim Ark), but rather who is or is not a "natural born citizen."

The British Nationality Act of 1772 states:

...That all Persons born, or who hereafter shall be born, out of the Ligeance of the Crown of England, or of Great Britain, whose Fathers were or shall be, by virtue of a Statute made in the Fourth Year of King George the Second, to explain a Clause in an Act made in the Seventh Year of the Reign of Her Majesty Queen Anne, for naturalizing Foreign Protestants, which relates to the natural-born Subjects of the Crown of England, or of Great Britain, intitled to all the Rights and Privileges of natural-born Subjects of the Crown of England or of Great Britain, shall and may be adjudged and taken to be, and are hereby declared and enacted to be, natural-born Subjects of the Crown of Great Britain, to all Intents, Constructions, and Purposes whatsoever, as if he and they had been and were born in this Kingdom: ...

That language only makes sense if "natural born subject" has the same meaning us "citizen" in US law. It makes no sense if it means the same thing as "natural born citizen," since in that case even naturalized citizens could Constitutionally be President.