So what is the difference between one born a citizen and a natural born citizen?
So what is the difference between one born a citizen and a natural born citizen?
Nothing.
There are two, and only two, classes of citizen - naturalized and natural born. With the emphasis of John Jay to George Washington during the convention, "natural born citizen."
Use Jay's underscore emphasis on the right word and the meaning is clear.
A natural born citizen is one who becomes a citizen at birth. Whether another nation, pursuant to its law, may claim the child as a citizen, is irrelevent to United States law.
In Perkins v. Elg, 99 F.2d 408 (DC Cir 1938), the Circuit Court stated,
The law of England, as of the time of the Declaration of Independence, was that a person born in that kingdom owed to the sovereign allegiance which could not be renounced. Many early American decisions applied that as the common law in this country. All agreed that every free person born within the limits and the allegiance of a State of the United States was a natural born citizen of the State and of the United States.
Perkins v. Elg 307 U.S. 325, 349-50 (1939) at the U.S. Supreme Court:
The court below [the Circuit Court], properly recognizing the existence of an actual controversy with the defendantsPage 307 U. S. 350
(Aetna Life Ins. Co. v. Haworth, 300 U. S. 227), declared Miss Elg "to be a natural born citizen of the United States," and we think that the decree should include the Secretary of State as well as the other defendants.
United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 US 649, 702 (1898)
The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, in the declaration that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside," contemplates two sources of citizenship, and two only: birth and naturalization.