"No person except a natural-born citizen or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution shall be eligible to the office of President, [Footnote 7]" and that Congress shall have power "to establish a uniform rule of naturalization." Thus, new citizens may be born or they may be created by naturalization.
The Constitution does not in words say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their
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parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case, it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens. The words "all children" are certainly as comprehensive, when used in this connection, as "all persons," and if females are included in the last, they must be in the first. That they are included in the last is not denied. In fact, the whole argument of the plaintiffs proceeds upon that idea.
Under the power to adopt a uniform system of naturalization, Congress, as early as 1790, provided "that any alien, being a free white person," might be admitted as a citizen of the United States, and that the children of such persons so naturalized, dwelling within the United States, being under twenty-one years of age at the time of such naturalization, should also be considered citizens of the United States, and that the children of citizens of the United States that might be born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States, should be considered as natural-born citizens. [Footnote 8] These provisions thus enacted have in substance been retained in all the naturalization laws adopted since. In 1855, however, the last provision was somewhat extended, and all persons theretofore born or thereafter to be born out of the limits of the jurisdiction of the United States, whose fathers were or should be at the time of their birth citizens of the United States were declared to be citizens also. [Footnote 9]
Notes:
1. The definition wasn't "self-evident" to those deciding the case.
2. Of those in Rubio's situation (at that time), there were doubts about their status that they didn't attempt to resolve.
3. They say that children born outside the U.S. to citizens are natural-born.
4. They recognize the role of naturalization law in clarifying who is natural-born and has no need of naturalization. (Most of those footnotes point back to specific laws which may have said "father" at the time but now say "parent.")
Vattel was an interesting political philosopher, but the founding fathers didn't make his writings a second constitution. As far as letters between Jay and Washington go, tell me what you think is pertinent in them and why.
My point was simply that it has been widely accepted by constitutional scholars that the Constitution does not define the term natural born citizen.
Minor v Happersett was a women’s suffrage appeal under the 14th Amendment and the Supreme Court opined on the exact circumstances of Virgina Minor’s natural born citizenship.
In 1874, the Supreme Court acknowledged that there were doubts about other methods of acquiring natural born citizenship. In 1898, in the high court’s decision in U.S. v Wong Kim Ark, a majority of those doubts were resolved to the satisfaction of most jurists.
Excerpted from the Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898): [An alien parents] allegiance to the United States is direct and immediate, and, although but local and temporary, continuing only so long as he remains within our territory, is yet, in the words of Lord Coke in Calvins Case, [7 Coke, 6a] strong enough to make a natural subject, for, if he hath issue here, that issue is a natural-born subject.
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.
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.
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.