The dissent disagreed (obviously, heh) and said that statutory citizens are essentially naturalized and so are 14A citizens and cannot have their citizenship revoked without their consent - meaning they believed that retention requirements were unconstitutional.
The majority said that statutory citizens are not naturalized "in" the U.S. because Congress didn't force them to go through the arduous naturalization process even though it had the power to make them do so.
I agree that, today, the court would not allow Congress to revoke Cruz' citizenship.
Regarding whether or not the Constitution specifies jus soli or jus sanguinis, the FAM says that the Constitution does not recognize jus sanguinis. (If it did, there would be no need for statutes granting citizenship at birth.):
b. Section 104(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1104 (a) gives the Secretary of State the responsibility for administration and enforcement of all nationality laws related to "the determination of nationality of a person not in the United States."
1. Jus soli (the law of the soil) - a rule of common law under which the place of a person's birth determines citizenship. In addition to common law, this principle is embodied in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and various U.S. citizenship and nationality statutes.2. Jus sanguinis (the law of the bloodline) - a concept of Roman or civil law under which a person's citizenship is determined by the citizenship of one or both parents. This rule, frequently called "citizenship by descent" or "derivative citizenship", is not embodied in the U.S. Constitution, but such citizenship is granted through statute. As U.S. laws have changed, the requirements for conferring and retaining derivative citizenship have also changed.
With all the talk about what Congress and the courts can and can’t do with a person’s citizenship, or what they can and can’t decide or legislate.... I think anybody who believes anything with Ted Cruz is airtight is smoking something powerful.
Why don’t we try to do something to make the rules clear and legally airtight? At this point I don’t even really care what the rules end up being, but all this wiggle room becomes worrisome when you realize that our courts and Congress are having all their communications read by a communist-run NSA... and the media creates alternate realities every hour of every day and it gets swallowed up by the general public.
Why in the world would anybody not want these questions LEGALLY settled now? Why in the world would anybody accept the idea that all of us whose safety and rights are bound up in the only political processes we are able to participate in still have no standing to at least KNOW THE RULES OF WHO WE CAN CHOOSE TO BE IN THE WHITE HOUSE? Why would anybody want to trust a supposedly oral “understanding” of a contract when they could have a written one that really is legally binding?
Really, all the Scotus said was that residency requirements are valid in claiming US citizenship for one who’d never lived here before. (Wasn’t there an age by which it must be claimed?) Until that time, I suppose it could have been viewed as sitting in an inactive file. Failure to act on it, could be seen as the individual acting to drop his citizenship.
It seems to me the principle is that despising your citizenship is the equivalent of renouncing it.