If a person is born in the Canal Zone today and their parents are US citizens by virtue of being born in the Panama Canal Zone, that baby is a US citizen.
When that baby has a baby, that baby will be a US citizen by virtue of their parent being a US citizen.
You cannot tell a person, “Hey, we realize that your parents were American citizens at the time of your birth, but you cannot be an American citizen.”
The parental presence requirements are listed here:
https://www.uscis.gov/us-citizenship/citizenship-through-parents
You are positing that Puerto Rican independence will still carry US Citizenship indefinitely. I am saying the one of the consequences of Puerto Rican independence will be citizenship in the independent country of Puerto Rico. I am proposing that they would have to choose citizenship at that time but at some point they would be an independent country and their status finally determined.
By your reasoning, I guess millions upon millions of Americans are British citizens, since we must have kept our British citizenship generation after generation even after becoming an independent nation? It’s bizarre to suggest that once a new country becomes independent all it’s people still retain the citizenship of the country they broke away from. When has that happened in history? That’s not even close to the norm. Your novel concept of citizenship negates the entire idea of independence.
This seems to be something you are very passionate about, but do you really think most conservatives want two more Democratic Senators, making it harder for us to keep the Senate, and more electoral votes for the Dems for president (Puerto Ricans here in the US usually vote 80% or more for the Dems after all)? Why make a left-leaning, mostly impoverished, Spanish-speaking Caribbean island a full-fledged American state?
The US should never have become an imperialist country, and we should have given a nation of people as different from ours as Puerto Rico its independence when we gave Cuba its freedom. We get no benefit from Puerto Rico, and we had no right to take it over permanently in the first place. We didn’t settle it and we didn’t really build it up; we only took it to participate in the European imperialist game of that era and it’s caused us needless problems.
Until the Act of October 10, 1978, persons who had acquired U.S. citizenship through birth outside of the United States to one U.S. citizen parent had to meet certain physical presence requirements to retain their citizenship. This legislation eliminated retention requirements for persons who were born after October 10, 1952. There may be cases where a person who was born before that date, and therefore subject to the retention requirements, may have failed to retain citizenship. [4]
Without ending the citizenship of current bona-fide citizens it is possible to, once again, change these laws to tighten them up.We are being gamed, that's for sure. For instance, I have a friend who lives in Israel and has for 40 years after immigrating there. Not only does she retain her citizenship, but so do all of her kids, who have all dutifully served in the Israeli Army and also vote in Israel elections, and most of whom have never set foot in the USA. The idea that *their* kids will also be super-dual citizens like this is ridiculous.