- "Natural born citizen issue. "
Well, what does the law say?- The ABC’s of Immigration: Citizenship Rules for People Born Outside the United States
- All persons born in the United States are citizens of the United States (with the very minor exception of certain children of diplomatic personnel).
This is perhaps the only simple rule of US citizenship.
One of the most complicated areas of US citizenship law involves the passage of citizenship to children born outside the US to one or more US citizen parents.
While naturalized US citizens are treated like natural born citizens,
- which includes those who are deemed citizens even when born outside the US, in almost every respect,
- (though expect to see efforts in Congress to change this if Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger decides to run for President).
The rules determining when such children are citizens are extremely detailed,
and vary a great deal depending on when the child was born since the laws changed several times in the 20th century.
...
What are the rules for people born between December 23, 1952 and November 13, 1986?
Again, children born abroad to two US citizen parents were US citizens at birth, as long as one of the parents resided in the US at some point before the birth of the child.
When one parent was a US citizen and the other a foreign national,
- the US citizen parent must have resided in the US for a total of 10 years prior to the birth of the child,
with five of the years after the age of 14.
- An EXCEPTION FOR PEOPLE SERVING IN THE MILITARY was created
While there were initially rules regarding what the child must do to retain citizenship,
- amendments since 1952 have ELIMINATED these requirements.
Children born out of wedlock to a US citizen mother were US citizens
- if the mother was resident in the US for a period of one year prior to the birth of the child.
- only if legitimated before turning 21.
Cruz was born on December 22, 1970 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada where his parents, Eleanor Elizabeth Darragh Wilson and Rafael Bienvenido Cruz.
Cruz's mother was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware, in a family of three quarters Irish and one quarter Italian descent.
Eleanor Darragh, mother of Ted Cruz, was raised in Delaware, graduated from a Catholic High School (1952) in the U.S., as well as Rice University (1956), so clearly she meets the residency requirements.
Cruz's father, who was born in 1939 in Matanzas, Cuba, "suffered beatings and imprisonment for protesting the oppressive regime" of dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Source
... 74-Year-old Rafael Bienvenido Cruz: "I came to this country legally," Cruz's father says.
"I came here with a legal visa, and ... every step of the way, I have been here legally."
In an interview near his home outside Dallas, the elder Cruz says that as a teenager, he fought alongside Fidel Castro's forces to overthrow Cuba's U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista.
He was caught by Batista's forces, he says, and jailed and beaten before being released.
It was 1957, and Cruz decided to get out of Cuba by applying to the University of Texas.
Upon being admitted, he adds, he got a four-year student visa at the U.S. Consulate in Havana.
"Then the only other thing that I needed was an exit permit from the Batista government," Cruz recalls.
"A friend of the family, a lawyer friend of my father, basically bribed a Batista official to stamp my passport with an exit permit."
The Rafael Cruz that his son Ted portrays is a kind of Cuban Horatio Alger
- — arriving in the U.S. with only $100, learning English on his own and washing dishes seven days a week for 50 cents an hour.
"Since he liked to eat seven days a week, he worked seven days a week, and he paid his way through the University of Texas," Ted Cruz says
of his father, "and then ended up getting a job and eventually going on to start a small business and to work towards the American dream."
Only he did that in Canada, where Ted was born.
His father went there after having earlier obtained political asylum in the U.S. when his student visa ran out.
He then got a green card, he says, and married Ted's mother, an American citizen.
The two of them moved to Canada to work in the oil industry.
"I worked in Canada for eight years," Rafael Cruz says. "And while I was in Canada, I became a Canadian citizen."
The elder Cruz says he renounced his Canadian citizenship when he finally became a U.S. citizen in 2005 —
- 48 years after leaving Cuba.
- "I don't know. I guess laziness, or — I don't know," he says.
Peter Spiro, a legal expert on U.S. citizenship at Temple University, says Rafael Cruz followed "sort of a zigzag path to citizenship."
Spiro says Cruz's multicountry odyssey did not follow traditional models for immigration.