Dual Citizenship and the Strange Case of the Election of Barack Obama

Jus sanguinis (Latin: right of blood) is a principle of nationality law by which citizenship is not determined by place of birth but by having one or both parents who are citizens of the state.  Children at birth may automatically be citizens if their parents have state citizenship or national identities of ethnic, cultural, or other origins.  Citizenship can also apply to children whose parents belong to a diaspora and were not themselves citizens of the state conferring citizenship.  This principle contrasts with jus soli.

Jus soli (Latin: right of the soil), commonly referred to as birthright citizenship, is the right of anyone born in the territory of a state to nationality or citizenship.  As an unconditional basis for citizenship, it is the predominant rule in the Americas but is rare elsewhere.  Since the Twenty-seventh Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland was enacted in 2004, no European country grants citizenship based on unconditional jus soli.

A person who becomes a U.S. citizen through naturalization is not considered natural born citizen.  Consequently, naturalized U.S. citizens are not eligible to become President of the United States or Vice President of the United States, which would ordinarily be the case as established by the Presidential Succession Act.

Time to buy old US gold coins

Some argue that the phrase “natural born citizen” describes a category of citizenship distinct from that described by the phrase “U.S. Citizen” in Article Two of the United States Constitution, and this was discussed during the Constitutional convention of 1787.  While it is true that “natural born citizen” is not defined anywhere within the text of the Constitution and that the Constitution makes use of the phrase “citizen” and “natural-born citizen,” Supreme Court decisions from United States v. Wong Kim Ark to the present have considered the distinction to be between natural-born and naturalized citizenship.

An April 2000 report by the Congressional Research Service, asserts that most constitutional scholars interpret the phrase “natural born citizen” as including citizens born outside the United States to parents who are U.S. citizens under the “natural born” requirement.

In her 1988 article in the Yale Law Journal, Jill Pryor wrote, “It is well settled that ‘native-born’ citizens, those born in the United States, qualify as natural born.  It is also clear that persons born abroad of alien parents, who later become citizens by naturalization, do not.  But whether a person born abroad of American parents or of one American and one alien parent, qualifies as natural born has never been resolved.”

Judge Pryor (she was nominated to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals by President Obama safely in office in 2012, and confirmed by the Senate in 2014 )is correct in one regard, “that a person born…of one American and one alien parent, qualifies as natural born has never been resolved,” presumably in a court of law.  That is because just as “persons born abroad of alien parents, who later become citizens by naturalization” do not qualify as natural born, neither should a person born of one American and one alien parent, qualify as natural born.  This latter circumstance is the definition and the qualifications of a person having the rights of nationality in two countries, or dual citizenship.

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