You need to change your name from Mrs Rogers to Missunderstands ... What you quoted is NOT a rejection of English common law supporting someone being born overseas as a NBS. They’re trying to build a case that the such common law doesn’t override local laws in the other country in question. They’re doing this so they can say that Chinese law (in spite of a treaty that was contrary to this principle) doesn’t override the 14th amendment’s creation of at-birth citizenship for aliens (or non-NBC’s) and has NOTHING to do with natural born citizenship. NOTHING.
Gray writes, “Nor can it be doubted that it is the inherent right of every independent nation to determine for itself, and according to its own constitution and laws, what classes of persons shall be entitled to its citizenship.”
It reinforces this thought by continuing beyond the Binney citation you quoted by then quoting Lord Malmesbury who wrote: “Those born in the territory of a nation are (as a general principle) liable when actually therein to the obligations incident to their status by birth. Great Britain considers and treats such persons as natural-born subjects, and cannot therefore deny the right of other nations to do the same.” What the Supreme Court is doing is recognizing the possibility of dual citizenship, but they do NOT reject English common law here. You’re not reading and comprehending the entire argument.
At the end of section IV, the court writes: “So far as we are informed, there is no authority, legislative, executive or judicial, in England or America, which maintains or intimates that the statutes (whether considered as declaratory or as merely prospective) conferring citizenship on foreign-born children of citizens have superseded or restricted, in any respect, the established rule of citizenship by birth within the dominion.” This doesn’t reject common law, but ALLOWS for the possibility of dual citizenship. They HAVE TO DO THIS so they can say WKA is a citizen by virtue of the 14th amendment (not natural born).
The very next sentence says, “Even those authorities in this country, which have gone the farthest towards holding such statutes to be but declaratory of the common law have distinctly recognized and emphatically asserted the citizenship of native-born children of foreign parents.” If the court was REJECTING common law, they would NOT admit that there are authorities who say such statutes (for being born overseas) are declaratory of the common law. Instead, they’re saying common law or not, the country where the birth occurred can exercise its own statutory authority over the citizenship of those persons. For natural born citizens, this type of conflict between laws of two nations would not exist. If Gray considered WKA to be a natural born citizen, he would not have had to have to built such a lengthy and convoluted argument to make him a citizen. Do you not understand that??
They specifically say that common law does NOT make the children born overseas of citizens automatically citizens. They are denying, in section 4, the suggestion by the other side that citizenship comes naturally from heritage, not birth location. That is why section 4 starts:
“IV. It was contended by one of the learned counsel for the United States that the rule of the Roman law, by which the citizenship of the child followed that of the parent, was the true rule of international law, as now recognized in most civilized countries, and had superseded the rule of the common law, depending on birth within the realm, originally founded on feudal considerations.”
At its beginning, they set up what they are going to expound on. That is why you need to learn to read paragraphs and pages.
It finishes with:
“So far as we are informed, there is no authority, legislative, executive or judicial, in England or America, which maintains or intimates that the statutes (whether considered as declaratory or as merely prospective) conferring citizenship on foreign-born children of citizens have superseded or restricted, in any respect, the established rule of citizenship by birth within the dominion. Even those authorities in this country, which have gone the farthest towards holding such statutes to be but declaratory of the common law have distinctly recognized and emphatically asserted the citizenship of native-born children of foreign parents. 2 Kent Com. 39, 50, 53, 258 note; Lynch v. Clarke, 1 Sandf.Ch. 583, 659; Ludlam v. Ludlam, 26 N.Y. 356, 371.
Passing by questions once earnestly controverted, but finally put at rest by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, it is beyond doubt that, before the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 or the adoption of the Constitutional [p675] Amendment, all white persons, at least, born within the sovereignty of the United States, whether children of citizens or of foreigners, excepting only children of ambassadors or public ministers of a foreign government, were native-born citizens of the United States.”
And, as I have shown before, native born & natural born were regularly used interchangeably by the US DA & the courts.