I lived right across the border from Canada for years, so I knew different people of mixed American-Canadian families. It’s not like Canada is Cuba, or even Mexico.
Here is an extensive article on Cruz’s Canadian citizenship, which he didn’t know he had, and hadn’t used. I can believe that since Canada just passes out its citizenship as the U.S. does and doesn’t require as much in return:
Cruz was born an American citizen.
His parents reported his birth to the American consulate.
Ironically his parents were there to start a business, so basically some want to punish their entrepreneurship.
He moved back to the U.S. at four and never used his Canadian citizenship for anything.
I also don’t agree with you on where someone’s allegiance is. It starts to develop at birth, but there are a lot of factors with that.
The person’s family.
The person’s other influences in the country.
How many years they live in a particular situation.
My mother was American, but my father was German and emigrated to the U.S. in his twenties. He had allegiances to both and though he became a U.S. citizen before any of his children were born, he passed that on somewhat to us when we were growing up.
But, we also had the influences of the country we grew up, and he had allegiances to it as well, and didn’t speak German to us, so we ended up American in our thinking and allegiance. We cheered a bit for German athletes and went to Oktoberfests, but that was about it.
The thing is with Cruz, he spent his first four years in Canada with an American mother and a refugee from communism father in a country that until he was a lot older he would have taken to be a virtual U.S. doppelganger. I am Cruz’s age and I barely remember Nixon’s scandal and Ford, and probably most people my age don’t remember that much. So his four years in Canada would not have impacted him at all. I doubt his mother was feeding him with ideas of down with America and Canada must conquer it.
I also knew a family well where one parent was Canadian and one American. They lived in Canada until the children were late elementary age and then moved across the border to the U.S. The older boy liked to think of himself as more Canadian like his father, and the younger girl like her American mother, and the boy was a little more passionate about Canada since he had to move from there at around age 12 or so, but there was no real inner conflict of allegiances with them. They now all live in the U.S. as adults. And like Cruz, whose mother is American, these kids always had American extended family too, and visited here a lot before they lived here.
By contrast, what deep allegiances would a four year old possibly have to any country, much less Canada? The influences to that age would be his family, and not really be political.
You’re getting into this nuanced analysis of the actual allegiances that he may or may not have developed. That’s not that issue any more than the fact that some people may be more mature than others at the age of 35 is relevant to that requirement, which is not at all.
I appreciate your experiences but allegiance as you describe it differs completely from the concepts in colonial times. Then you owed allegiance from birth, it wasn’t about your choice.
If a foreign nation had a claim on your allegiance then that was simply too great a risk for the one office of President. You could renounce your foreign citizenship, you could naturalize, you could be a born citizen based on statute and that was fine as a citizen, you had all the rights of a citizen except for qualifying for President.
The more you understand the colonial era and the thinking of the founders you see how, in their minds, this made sense.
Does it make sense today? You might think not, but the current usurper has, due to his foreign allegiance, done more damage then anyone could imagine. So yes it makes sense today and true patriots must insist upon it.
Respectfully, ...
Wait a minute, wait a minute....I thought his father was jailed for supporting Castro.