“If the clause is so clearly meaningless as you demonstrate, (fence jumper children qualify) why bother exempting themselves.”
I seriously cannot understand why people persist in bringing up the grandfather clause as some sort of indication that one must be born of two citizen parents to be president. Their reasons for exempting themselves has nothing to do with how one is born a citizen, nor with split loyalties, nor with anything else of continued relevance today.
They grandfathered themselves in because no one, not a soul, had been born an American citizen. Not because no one had had an two American parents. No one had had any American parents. Nor had anyone been born on American soi. Because there was no America before there was.
We already know, everyone knows, that the Founders wanted presidents to have been born U.S. citizens. All the grandfather clause tells us is that an exception was made because no one had been born a citizen. That’s it.
The dissent in US v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), has a slighty different take on that.
Some of the founders had been born on what was and became American soil. The "grandfather" clause was literally to admit foreign-born people to obtain the presidency.
In the convention it was, says Mr. Bancroft, 'objected that no number of years could properly prepare a foreigner for that place; but as men of other lands had spilled their blood in the cause of the United States, and had assisted at every stage of the formation of their institutions, on the 7th of September it was unanimously settled that foreign-born residents of fourteen years who should be citizens at the time of the formation of the constitution are eligible to the office of president.' 2 Bancroft, Hist. U. S. Const. 192.