What does it mean to be a natural born citizen?
Most legal experts contend it means someone is a citizen from birth and doesn’t have to go through a naturalization process to become a citizen.
If that’s the definition, then Cruz is a natural born citizen by being born to an American mother and having her citizenship at birth. The Congressional Research Service, the agency tasked with providing authoritative research to all members of Congress, published a report after the 2008 election supporting the thinking that “natural born” citizenship means citizenship held at birth.
There are many legal and historical precedents to strongly back up this argument, experts have said.
Those precedents were the subject of a recent op-ed in the Harvard Law Review by two former solicitor generals of opposing parties, Neal Katyal and Paul Clement, who worked for Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, respectively. They wrote that “natural born” had a longstanding definition dating back to colonial times.
British common law recognized that children born outside of the British Empire remained subjects, and were described by law as natural born, Katyal and Clement wrote.
The framers, of course, would have been intimately familiar with these statutes and the way they used terms like natural born, since the (British) statutes were binding law in the colonies before the Revolutionary War, they said.
Additionally, the first Congress of the United States passed the Naturalization Act of 1790, just three years after the Constitution was written, which stated that children born abroad to U.S. citizens were, too, natural born citizens. Many members of the inaugural Congress were also authors of the Constitution.
:: British common law recognized that children born outside of the British Empire remained subjects ::
^^provided BOTH parents were British subjects at the time of birth^^; it takes 2 to tango.
The US, on the other hand can point to narrowing that simple requirement to being in service to the USA (military or State business)