Eleanor Darragh, b. Wilmington DE 1935. Moved from DE to TX as a teenager, graduated Rice Univ TX age 21 (1956)... Ummm I think that makes her qualify. Only moved to Canada in the 1960s. The age 14 thing. The 10 year resident thing all passes muster, unless you want to disqualify Delaware as a state because of SloJo Biden... LOL
OK--very good work. I guess we ignore the possibility that Texas exercises the option. We further assume as I think I have heard elsewhere that there are no other gaps in her record. If you assume Canada in 60, that still leaves her 4 years in the US after college and I believe she had a significant job record that supported that conclusion.
I wonder if you are working with the correct statute? There was a 1970's effective date amendment that changes the periods. I have been less worried about that for the reason that as I recall, the periods are more favorable for our position that the five years after 14 statute.
That still leaves you with a Con Law problem--invalidity of the Mother Citizen Child statute because the son of a father under those circumstances would not pass--that is subject to repair. You retroactively provide that a child of a father citizen who can prove descent (DNA evidence or other acceptable standard) gets citizenship on the same basis as the child of a mother citizen.
That still leaves you with the existing Con Law view of Article II Sec. 1 which is that it means within the geographical territory of the US.
You put the fix on that with an amendment that defines Natural Born Citizen to include someone who is a citizen at birth--maybe you add some other requirements like two of four grandparents and five of eight great grandparents.
If I were really the lawyer doing this, I would look for a way to get the current guy out of the definition because I still think there is hope that we can undo many of his acts which required a "president" to effectuate.
I see the way through the Natural Born Citizen clause for Cruz as requiring either an amendment to the Constitution or a radical shift in view from the prevailing Con Law Bar view of the law by the Supreme Court.
But the best case and easiest way through starts with the assumption of citizenship at birth and my analysis in #263 is designed to lay out a partial view of that path.
However the citizenship statutes are fairly complicated because they reflect periodic modifications by Congress. If you take as the basic facts, Rafael is married to Eleanor; Rafael being a Cuban citizen; Eleanor being a US Citizen; given all the right periods; no other marital or non marital relationships; the answer works out as Big Ed suggests in #260 and we work through in #263.
The real world is never that simple.
I don't have time to brief this issue completely. As I recall, one element of the mother citizen statute is that the Mother is married to the Father. Not only no reason to believe that is the case not having seen a marriage certificate but the birth certificate says she is Mrs. Wilson, not Mrs. Cruz.
That may work in favor of Cruz--Wilson was presumably a US Citizen and you have a Texas statute presuming the husband is the father--so maybe Cruz has a two citizen parent position--maybe that helps; maybe it does not.
And if not, maybe a second statute which we haven't looked at gets a better result if Eleanor (Cruz's mother) is single.
Although I would guess that Cruz's attorney's have looked at all these issues and all the permutations of the issues and concluded he was a citizen at birth, I haven't and so have not yet seen how they get there.
We owe Brown Deer for significant work in addressing the factual issues and at some point presume we will look at the statutory and legal questions that would control the answers.