Citizens by Natural Law Page 2
Ignorance of Natural Law is, and always has been, wide-spread, -in the past as well as the present. By natural law the characteristics of the parents are passed to the off-spring. Rhinos inherit horns, zebras stripes, leopards spots. Humans inherit the same nature as the parents, and in the political realm, the same nationality.
No law is needed to validate or acknowledge this fact because it is part and parcel of the bedrock of all civilizations. The only thing that blocks it is when people alter that normal order of things and move,…not just to another county, province, or state, but to an entirely different country -with different laws, customs, religion, history, and perhaps language. Such a move has, until the advent of jet airplanes, been a permanent move that endured for decades, if not for life. Such a drastic change in peoples lives result in the need for the citizens of their adopted country to accommodate them and their off-spring. For children who are born, then raised in their parents new homeland to not be bestowed with civil equality (citizenship) to their peers who were born of native citizens, would be an injustice to them. Hence the 14th Amendment proclaims that they are U.S. citizens, not simply because they were born in the US, but because their parents made themselves subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, as evidenced by their legal permanent adoption of US residency.
Citizenship is automatic for children of those who legally reside in a nation. But “reside” is not a highly flexible term. I once stopped in Hawaii for 30 minutes while enroute to Vietnam. That didn’t make me a Hawaiian resident. If such a stop by a pregnant alien results in birth on US soil, her child is NOT a US citizen because she is not a “resident”. Without residency, subjection-submission to US jurisdiction is non-existent.
All quotes by SCOTUS Justices and others have an identical meaning when the words “natural born” are dropped. That shows that their use is disingenuous and unnecessary. It’s done because of a career-long failure to grasp the difference between being a native born citizen and a natural citizen. The conflation results from the failure to realize that they are concurrent states 99.99% of the time. It’s only the age of rapid travel and alien visitors that has attached significance to the formerly irrelevant distinction between the two. AN
Article II, US Cosntituion: Presidential requirement. “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President;”. What if it said this: “No Person except a native born Citizen…” Using that phrase would include almost any person born on US soil, including those with British citizen fathers loyal to the Crown. Does anyone in their right mind think the framers were not intent on preventing that?
Natural born citizenship includes the aspect of native birth. But a requirement of only citizens of native birth does NOT require including the aspect of birth to citizen parents. Birth to alien fathers would be included. The framers loathed and feared the possibilities inherent in such divided loyalty due to dual-citizenship. They wanted “pure-blooded Americans” only. AN
PhoxarRed wrote: “The entire establishing basis world-wide for …citizenship…is that citizenship is CONFERRED”(!)
You are not living in the real world. Natural born citizenship is not “conferred”, it is not “granted” by government, rather, it is conveyed from parent to child. Only the citizenship of non-NBC is under government decree.
As for children; “citizenship is conferred representing the exchange of the Nation’s protection of the child for the child’s allegiance owed thereafter” You’re in a philosophical dreamland. Allegiance-to-government in reality is not connected to children whatsoever, in any legal sense. That’s reality. And even as adults, allegiance is irrelevant except in regard to POTUS eligibility, because governments have the authority to draft every single person against their will even if they hate the government. That’s reality also. You might realize that if you had been drafted.
“the usage history of “Natural Born Citizen” in the United States, is as Jill Pryor wrote…”well-settled” as simply meaning “native born”. Is it also well settled that American Indians are from India? Why aren’t you willing to express any opinion as to whether or not that is logically correct? Always quoting others like you’re an opinion regurgitating robot.
“There is no other sensible explanation.” Where have you been the last few months when I repeated pointed out to you the irrefutably sensible explanation that native born and natural born overlap 99.99%? It’s predictable and almost unavoidable that they would be erroneously conflated. AN
“At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners.”
Native birth is NOT the sole determinative factor in US citizenship, though it IS a part of the description of who is a natural born citizen. The Citizenship of natural born citizens is NOT granted by the government, nor by Law, nor by the Constitution. The Constitution was written to bring forth a new form of government, stating new things that had not existed before. Citizenship passing from parents to children was NOT new but had been an operative principle for eons. The framer’s weren’t interested in restating what everyone already knew and was an immutable reality.
This sounds true but the devil is in the details. If a person is born to alien permanent residents, then the statement is true. If a person is born to US citizens, the statement is false because the Constitution DOES NOT even deal with the subject. The 14th Amendment was written not to state the obvious, but to make the unobvious U.S. law, namely the citizenship of persons born to an alien father or a former slave. AN
“it is another thing to BLINDLY grant the full rights and power of polity to a child of aliens with no intent of naturalization. “
It’s another thing but definitely not a meaningful thing. The children are not affected significantly by whether or not their parent naturalize. They remain who they are regardless. The important thing isn’t whether or not their parents don’t, or can’t naturalize, it’s that their life is lived-out in the U.S., with no intent to return to where they moved or escaped from. Their children are not immigrants and have absolutely no connection to their parents homeland, any more than any of US has a connection to our grandparents, or great-grandparents homeland. AN
“The child born of alien parents in the United States is held to be a citizen thereof, and to be subject to duties, with regard to this country, which do not attach to the father.” Alexander Porter Morse “A Treatise on Citizenship, by Birth and by Naturalization”
(1881) page 241
Being “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” is something different from merely being “under the jurisdiction”. There’s no volition involved in being under a powerful entity’s power, but to obey it’s laws and orders requires volition, the willful obedience of the governed. So please get the distinction clear. “Under” is an accurate quote but it’s not from the 14th Amendment but from some other law or quotation.
“Jurisdiction’ is a concrete bond between citizen and country. That bond also requires the citizen to aid in the defense of the country when called.”
This is nothing more than a philosophical abstract concept. It has no connection to reality. No bond actually exists. Citizens aren’t “required” by that non-existent bond to aid in national defense. But governments can pass laws requiring conscription of men of combat age for defense. Everything else is purely imaginary. Let’s stick to reality and not swim in the pond of philosophy.
“The United States has no jurisdiction over the offspring of foreign parent or parents.” Too bad you didn’t add the caveat “unless the parents are subject to the US jurisdiction, which would make that sentence completely accurate. If the parents are subject, then of course the children are subject because the children are subject to the parents.
Obama’s father definitely was not subject to the jurisdiction of the United State because he was not a legal permanent resident, but merely a foreign student allowed in via a temporary visa. Hence his off-spring was born with dual-citizenship and not describable as a child who was clearly subject to US jurisdiction since only his mother was a US citizen. I’m unaware of any law or SCOTUS ruling that decides how the 14th Amendment applies in such a situation. Perhaps there is none. It logically would require new law or an amendment to clarify the jurisdiction of a child born with dual citizenship. But it doesn’t matter in regard to US citizenship. But what is indisputable is that such a child/citizen is NOT a natural born citizen and thus is ineligible to the office of President. AN
The United States Naturalization Act of 1790 is clear; the right of citizenship did “not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States….” Citizenship was inherited exclusively through the father.
“Justice Field in Carlisle v. United States, “All strangers are under the protection of the sovereign while they are within his territories, and owe a temporary allegiance in return for that protection.”
“By Allegiance is meant the Obligation of Fidelity and Obedience which the individual OWES to the government under which he lives, or to his Sovereign in return for the protection he receives.”
I hope the good Justice was quoting some English source because if those words came out of his own mind, he was a total jackass. “protection of the SOVEREIGN”?? “within HIS territories”? How much more imperialistic could a comment be? You’re raising questions about your own nationality by including such an un-American concept.
Allegiance…obligation…fidelity…obedience…are ALL Feudal-Monarchical “Rights-of-Kings” concepts developed for the sole purpose of justifying the reign of a single individual over all others. The United States overthrew that whole system yet people dig it up and drag it out of its grave to try to validate their misrepresentation of the 14th Amendment as granting citizenship purely based on place of birth.
Foreigners being “under” the protection and jurisdiction of a government is a two-part reality. 1. Protection is only for those who live in the nation, not visitors or illegal resident. That protection is the basis for government to assume the prerogative to force them to aid in national defense, and thus they are “under” the government’s jurisdiction.
The 14th Amendment requires those born to foreigners to be “subject” to US jurisdiction, which does not mean the obvious fact that they are “under” US Law, but that they (the parents) accept the obligations of citizenship even though they are not citizens. The government’s position is that their legal participation in American life is taken as their acceptance of those obligations. Hence they are officially viewed as willingly being “subject” to U.S. jurisdiction. Then, by the 14th Amendment, their native-born children are declared to be U.S. citizens. They aren’t natural-born citizens because their parents are not citizens (unless they are natural-ized).
“the allegiance of parents…is irrelevant in determining the citizenship status of a child born in the United States.” True, since allegiance is a sentiment known only to the person that feels it, but what is relevant is their status as legal permanent residents. Children of alien visitors, and illegal aliens aren’t citizens under the 14th Amendment since they aren’t subject to US jurisdiction. AN
To PhoxarRed: You go further off the rails with “Obama was native born, and is thereby confirmed to have been eligible all along.” Your delusion that native=natural is pathetic. You’re like a pre-programmed computer than has no input channel, just keeps running its preset routine endlessly since it can acquire no new input. If you have actually read what has been well written concerning natural citizenship then you are a most miserable excuse for a debater since you have not countered anything written about it. Thus it appears you are not here to learn and debate, but merely to regurgitate and agitate. You revel is your high opinion of your own wisdom and belittle the intelligence of anyone who disagrees with your fixed view, but the one who looks like a fool is he who refuses to debate or rebut the irrefutable logic and truth of the meaning of natural born citizen. Debating you is like debating a wall, no response, and that’s because you have none. You can’t counter anything that refutes your delusion, so you don’t even try.
“getting in an uproar about microscopic graphical flaws” In case you haven’t noticed, the 1st COLB was a totally fake “document”, only the border was real. (see https://h2ooflife.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/obama-fake-colb.jpg)
“throwing out more frivolous accusations -to call the…President a “forger”. For one who seems to know the law so well, please tell us how “the clandestine creation of a document image which is an illegal imitation of an official government document used to mislead the nation into believing it’s a reproduction/scan of an official released document” is not an act covered by the legal definition of forgery, or how exposing the truth is “frivolous”? AN
Like it or not, all must accept the reality that the 14th Amendment is what it is, even though people can find various faults with it from different perspectives, -and for it’s lack of specificity.
The quotes you shared are good evidence for your point. The native birth of children of domiciled aliens automatically imparts citizenship Constitutionally, while naturalization law covers children NOT born in the U.S.
The huge presumptuous error you threw in without justification, was to use the phrase “natural born citizen” to describe children born to domiciled aliens when you have no quoted case law, or better, SCOTUS ruling, that uses that description. You could have stuck to the straight and narrow path by using the correct word “native” instead, but you had to “go off the reservation” into the land of imagination.
Natural citizenship is a term and concept that has actual meaning, it’s not a loosely malleable term that one can distort to mean something that’s accurately described by an entirely different word (i.e. -native). Conflating the two is a logic error employed due to bias or the fact that they overlap 99.99%.
“Courts do not recognized “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” True, and no one has argued that they do. That’s just another straw man you set up so you can knock it down. But by saying such a thing you reveal that you prefer to believe that those concepts have no relevant and unique meaning whatsoever. By throwing the baby out with the bath water you can discard the reality that the framers of the Constitution could have worded the Presidential eligibility clause thusly: “No citizen born of a foreign father shall be eligible to the office of President of the United States.”, and it would have meant the same thing to them as what they wrote. AN
As I’ve stated before, errors of language and the concepts words represent can be perpetuated for generations and centuries. Consensus opinion is a subject separate from actual truth. The poster you mentioned would apply back then to 99.999% of US citizens, but it does not follow that the .001% exception did not exist. That exception would not be describable as a natural born citizen even though born within US borders.
One could look out over a vast herd of sheep and declare; “All sheep are white.” without fear of rebuttal because that would be the consensus view, but far out in the herd is one single black sheep, which confounds the “common knowledge” that all sheep are white. So it is with native born citizens and natural born citizens. By common description 100% of natural born citizens are native born (though theoretical exceptions could exist), but only 99.99% of native born citizens are natural born because the rare exception appears when one is born to an alien that is not subject to U.S. jurisdiction. Barack Obama Sr. was such a person. If his off-spring was born within US territory he would be a native born citizen due to his mother being an American, but he would also be the black sheep exception to the rule since, unlike the other 99.99% of citizens, his father was a non-subject alien. Being such an exception puts him outside of the description of a natural born citizen.
But what’s not clear is how one should view the philosophical exceptions to that description, such as the father’s death or abandonment prior to birth of his child. NBC status based on the mother’s citizenship alone is outside the common description of a natural born citizen, but since it wouldn’t involve foreign allegiance or dual-citizenship, should it matter?
Since Obama’s parents were married, having an alien non-domiciled father put him outside of the description of what a natural born citizen is. Raising that point is not an attack on Obama but a criticism of the failure to be true to the Constitution. Allowing an exception in his case may be a sociological good, but it’s Constitutionally bad. Though his Presidency will be judged not by his ineligibility but by his policies, decisions, and actions, or inactions. AN
The matter at hand is “natural born citizen”, not citizen. Only natural born citizens are eligible, any other form of citizenship is inadequate.
A nation is the “aggregate of persons, so closely associated with each other by common descent, language, or history, as to form a distinct race or people” (Oxford English Dictionary).
“Natural born” describes the naturally occuring phenomenon of citizens born of citizens. This condition is unalienable, immutable, and is immune from statute; it is a law of nature.
The phrase succinctly and precisely describes a unique phenomenon.
Our Declaration of Independence explicitly acknowledges the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”. Citizens born of citizens is a law of nature.
Additionally, “native” pertains to place of birth and never anything more, “natural” pertains to the qualities inherent at birth which “constitute a kind or species” (Richardson), and “consanguinity” (Merriam-Webster).
(Look it up: Random House, Merriam-Webster, Cambridge Advanced, American Heritage, as well as historic dictionares: Walker’s , Johnson’s , Richardson’s ).
Consanguinity is never mentioned for native, it is for natural. Every definition of natural is concerned with qualities. Natural born = consanguinity. A “natural born citizen” has the particular characteristic of birth to citizen parents: consanguinity.
su359115 wrote wrote: The basis for citizenship changed March 26, 1790. The Case of Mr. Smith epitomized that event, as it occurred right during the necessary transition of the constitution being adopted and finally ratified, and presaged one of the first legislated acts of the 1st Congress, the 1790 Uniform Naturalization Act.
How could Madison be right, and also wrong? Dr. Ramsay was right under natural law along with the new parameters of the fledgling republic; Mr. Madison, an attorney trained under English law, having relied on his entire career on legal luminaries such as Chief Justice Lord Coke in the 1600’s, to Blackstone . . . Madison argued the case the only way he knew how.
However, the first legislators had broken through the limited jurisdiction of a colonial state, the transition from subject to citizen. They were free men, while many lawyers remained mentally enslaved to their ‘mother,’ English law.
It’s a logic error to conflate native-born with natural born, just as many cited authorities did. That is the natural result of the fact that they overlapped 99.999%. All natural born citizens were native born, but not all native born persons were natural citizens. Natural citizens are only those who are born to citizens, they receive their citizenship naturally, not via any law or statute. As an almost universal rule the two terms referred to the same class of people, but now and then there was an exception. Children born to alien fathers who were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States were not natural born citizens, nor citizens of any kind. Only children born to resident aliens were citizens, per the 14th amendment because their parents were considered to be subject to US jurisdiction. Visiting aliens, and aliens working for their own government were not subject to US jurisdiction. The father of Obama was not a resident alien, but was a visiting alien. Obama is a citizen only because of the citizenship of his mother. But if he had been born outside the US, by US law at that time, he would not even be considered a US citizen.
As for the quote about “natural born British subjects”, bare in mind that you could substitute the word native for the word natural and it would make no difference in 99.999% of cases because any child born to an alien father was almost universally born to a resident alien father, and not a visiting alien father, nor mother. AN
Reply to PhoxarRed:
Your understanding of the meaning of “defined” is insufficient. I didn’t say the phrase was never used nor abused, I said “defined”. That is the fact of the matter. Saying erroneously that such-n-such a person is by their reckoning a NBC is not providing a definition of what a NBC is. They erred is using the term because it has no place in US law and won’t have one until a case of Presidential eligibility is adjudicated by the Supreme Court. But that won’t ever happen. The misguided statement/opinion of the court you quoted is completely unaltered in its meaning by dropping the “natural born” adjective phrase from preceding the word “citizen”. It was US citizenship that the court was deciding, NOT what the definition was of natural born citizenship when the phrase was written into the Constitution. AN
“Therefore every person born within the United States, its territories or districts, whether the parents are citizens or aliens, is a natural born citizen in the sense of the Constitution” This statement reflects the usual wide-spread logic error of statements that are generally true but not true in 100% of situations. He erred in added the word “every” which includes all Ambassadors and foreign government agents whose wives gave birth in the US. They were not natural born Americans, so the use of “every” reveals the defectiveness of the statement. He should have written “almost all persons born within…” Why do I have to point out what any clear thinking person can easily grasp?
Also, the Constitution does not give any emphasis about the subject of what a natural born citizen is, and speaking of “citizen” as if it’s interchangeable with phrase “natural born citizen” reveals muddled thinking. The phase should never be used, ever, except in regard to the Presidency. It should never be connected to United States citizenship because US citizenship is not dependent on being a legally defined “natural born citizen”. Nothing is dependent on it, except eligibility to the Presidency. AN
Dogmatic adherence to a belief that any birth to any alien leaves the child outside of the acceptance of US law regarding its citizenship is a kind of mental block that is based on a perception of how things should be, not how they actually are. The 14th Amendment was written in part to make it clear that children born to anyone who is a permanent part of American society, even if not fully assimilated, is, by force of Constitutional mandate, a citizen of the United States even if their parents are foreigners. It wasn’t intended to prevent that outcome, rather, it was intend to cause that outcome. AN
“As for the equivalency of “Natural” with “Native” born, over 200 years of common usage confirms it – you just aren’t looking.”
Inaccurate choice of terms. You meant “the claimed equivalency”. The claim has been reinforced by precedence, but only facts can be “confirmed”. Occasional judicial statements or even reasoning does not “confirm” an opinion, especially an opinion that is mistaken. As long as reason and countering opinions conflict with accepted conclusions, there is no settlement of the issue and it cannot be confirmed. Even “settled opinion” can be erroneous due to common misconceptions.
If 99.99999999% of all natural born citizens are also native born, or vice versa, that is NOT evidence that the terms are equivalent or logically synonymous, even though they’re naturally assumed to be. When the principles of jus soli and jus sanguinis are concurrently present in a child’s birth, it doesn’t follow that the two principles are synonymous. Yet you continue to slavish bow to erroneous precedence that assumes there’s no difference. That lack of independent thought and conclusion is beneath the duty of citizens to keep their government from straying away from reality and an accurate understanding of significant terms of Constitutional law.
Unfortunately, you are no doubt correct in the assessment that the conflation of native with natural is almost universally accepted, but remember that the number of cases dealing with the subject is few and far between. It’s not like it’s something that’s commonly re-visited with fresh eyes. AN
“since the beginning of this country jus soli is and has been the controlling, applicable concept for determining citizenship” of children of resident aliens.”
For natural born citizens ones place of birth was a concrete kind of evidence that could be used for confirmation since essentially all children of natural born citizens were born in the U.S., while proof of the citizenship of parents wasn’t backed by any concrete evidence since there was/is no such thing as a Citizenship certificate to prove one was born to natural born U.S. citizens. Hence referring to place of birth was a necessary substitute, and completely acceptable because 99.999% of children born to citizens were also native born.
“Since the beginning of this country, courts and members of Congress responsible for passing our laws have time and again affirmed that “native born” and “natural born” mean the exact same thing.”
They “affirmed” what they believed, but they could not “confirm” it since it was merely an opinion based on a common belief. The common belief was erroneous because it failed to split the hair to divide the two concepts into their individual descriptions.
Natural birth has no connection to place of birth, i.e. native birth. It’s simple common sense, derived from the actual meaning of “natural”. No one yet has given one single logical explanation as to how the word natural is synonymous with place of birth. There’s no logical connection between the two, only historic legal precedence conflating them has connected them.
Natural citizenship is politically organic, while jus soli citizenship is not since it is dependent of an abstract philosophical/political concept of ownership of all that is born on the land of the owner-baron-lord-duke-prince-king. Adapting it to citizens of a free nation required substituting concepts of subject-master, with citizen-birthright privilege, but that is an unnatural convolution to justify an intellectually unexplainable principle. How do national boundaries have anything to do with citizenship? It certainly doesn’t for the naturalized citizen. And it makes no sense either for those born to citizens. It only has a use when applied to children born domestically to resident aliens.
The concepts are rooted in natural law, which is one of the basis of decisions that evolved into common law, along with historic law (dating back to Roman Law), religious law (dating back to Genesis and the Laws of God and Moses) and the common sense view of fairness and justice and rights of rulers and subjects. Concepts of Natural Law arose from an understanding of Nature, not concepts of human law, borders and jurisdiction.
If native and natural were synonymous as used in Article II, then children of non-citizens could become President, which would nullify the intent of “NO person…Except…a natural born citizen shall be eligible…”, excluding other types of citizens, and reserving the Presidency only for children of citizens.
Citizens born from citizens are natural born.
Natural born do not suffer from conflicts of law. Dual citizens do suffer from conflicts of law.
Some definitions of “natural” state “consanguinity”. That never never never happens for “native”. See numerous previous posts on this or nativeversusnatural.com
There are no laws which change the plain meaning of the words, they have their ordinary meaning. Or do you propose that words have no meaning unless given by a judge? When I hold up four fingers must I say there are five? Three? Four? Sometimes all of those? What ever the party tells me? Must I disregard the reality of four fingers? No. Nor must I disregard the plain meaning of words.
The conflict of law you claim does not exist is stated right on the State Department website! It states quit plainly that dual citizens “owe allegiance to both the United States and the foreign country”. That problem does not exist for natural born citizens, hence the requirement for qualifying for office.