Three Ways to Citizenship & Three Views of “Natural Born”

Only a natural born citizen is eligible to be President.  How does one become a natural born citizen?  The answer is found by understanding how one becomes a citizen. There are only three ways to become a citizen.

1. by blood  2.  by oath  3.  by native-birth.  This is generally true throughout the entire world.

Citizenship By Blood can have three sources.  1.  born of native citizen parents.

2. born of a single citizen parent but deemed to be a citizen by permission of a statute if the parent was an American mother.  If born of an American father then one is deemed to be a citizen by right of descent. Statutes that allow the citizenship of an American mother to be deemed to be passed to her foreign-born child (who was fathered by a foreigner) are by allowance of government law since women historically have not been viewed as the source of the nationality of children (unless the father was unknown or deceased).  The right of nationality by descent only descends via the father.  That is ancient law and tradition thousands of years old, while nationality being allowed through the mother is less than a century old.

3. born of naturalized citizen parents.  The nationality of their children is deemed to be that of the parents by their blood relationship to them.  They are not naturalized citizens but are derivative citizens since their citizenship is derived by blood relationship to newly naturalized citizen parents.

Citizenship By Oath is citizenship by natural-ization.   By swearing a solemn oath of Allegiance (to the Constitution) & Renunciation (of all foreign loyalty and obedience) one is deemed to have shed their old national character and to have been transformed into a new natural American citizen (the butterfly being the metaphorical model; -from a worm of a royal subject of a foreign monarch to a free-flying liberated natural American citizen).

America, adhering to its fundamental principles, does not deem anyone to be an unnatural citizen, -a second-rate citizen, -an adopted citizen because of the fundamental American principle of citizenship equality (all supremacy, aristocracy, royalty, nobility and inequality are thrown in the rubbish pit of history). All Americans are equal because they are all natural citizens (by our philosophical fiction of nationality) but not all are born that way.

Only those born as natural citizens by being born of citizens are eligible to be President. Citizenship by Native-Birth is common law citizenship.  It was the rule in all of the colonies that anyone born of a father within and subject to the King’s authority (which excluded the French & Indians and foreign Ambassadors) were deemed to be his subjects.  That included not only children of his subjects but children of foreigners (immigrants) as well. That nationality policy (as old as the colonies) continued in a number of the newly established republics in America, -perhaps even all of them.

Such children were known as “sons of the soil” because they were not sons by blood, -the blood of citizen fathers. Their citizenship was State citizenship first and foremost with the State republics being the fathers of the union of the States, but even though it was by traditional British common law and not natural descent (per the newly embraced principles of Natural Rights), it was not openly rejected by the executive branch of the federal government, but it was not embraced either.

Its focus was not on inter-state citizenship recognition but on the international arena and how to follow a nationality policy in a highly competitive world with strong feelings about nationality.  That was the upshot of the British policy and doctrine that one was a subject of the king for life, and could not renounce their British nationality without being almost treasonous toward the Crown. Domestically, there was never a circumstance that forced a court to issue a legal ruling as to whether or not such common law citizens, born of aliens, were eligible to be President by reason of being considered to be “natural born citizens”, but aside from that one unsettled issue, they were in every respect equal to or undistinguished from children of Americans since they grew up in American society among mostly American children.

But the State Department drew a line regarding such children if their circumstance did not tend toward the raising of an American.  If an immigrant couple had a child in America but shortly thereafter moved back to their European homeland, and that child at adulthood sought to acquire an American passport or travel papers under the assertion of being an American, that child would be denied acknowledgement of citizenship and given nothing. It would have been viewed as a foreigner, -because it in fact was.

Mere native-birth alone was insufficient because the parents demonstrated that they were not members of American society by their abandonment of it.  Thus they were not subject to American authority, and their child was not deemed to be either.  Without that connection to America and the U.S. government, citizenship was not ascribed based solely on native-birth, –until the Wong holding .

In 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court held in U.S. v Wong Kim Ark that a child of Chinese immigrants, (and by extension, all children of immigrants, were U.S. citizens at birth.   Thus the federal policy (as old as the nation) was overthrown and replaced with the reinterpretation of the meaning of the 14th Amendment nationality clause, thereby making native-birth common law citizenship not only the allowance of the laws of the States but from then on also the law of the nation.

Thereafter, at the national level, you had two types of born citizens instead of just the previous one.  Along with children born of citizens you then had children born of immigrant foreigners who were deemed to be citizens from birth.  But they were not citizens by birth since they were not citizens by blood, having no inherent right of national inclusion by right of descent.

By what means did they come to be recognized as natural born citizens and thus eligible to be President? Answer: by no means, no logic, no facts, no history, no law, no court opinion, and no constitutional amendment.  They remain common law, constitutional, legally recognized, born citizens, -but the word “natural” has no connection to them.

The word cannot simply and unjustifiably be dismissed as if it has no meaning and no purpose regarding citizenship and presidential eligibility, -as if the authors of the Constitution after considering every word and implication, choose to insert a totally meaningless, irrelevant, and superfluous word for no discernible reason whatsoever.

Unless they did so anyway, it must mean what it means as recognized by its English language meaning, which is: something (a citizen) by nature; born as something, -not born with something; -innately something and unavoidably so. Common law citizens are not innately Americans because they are not born unavoidably American.  All the mother-to-be has to do is step over the border and her child, -then born beyond the U.S. borderline, is immediately beyond any possibility of being born an American. But if the father & mother are Americans, then their child will automatically be so also, regardless of birth location.

It seems pretty cut-&-dried, but there is a huge complication thrown into the mix by men with a nativist doctrine of nationality who claim that one must fulfill not just the minimum requirements of common law citizenship but go beyond them by being born of American parents.  So a natural born citizen is defined by them as not only one born in America (native-born) but also born of American citizens (citizen born).

The error of that is that birth location is unrelated to the nature of belonging, -to the principle of inclusion or membership.  That is the principle that binds all natural groups together, -from the family group to the national group.  Membership is by blood only.

The location of the house or hospital you were born in is irrelevant to and unrelated to both what family you naturally belong to as well as what country.  It doesn’t matter where the house or the hospital was located.  You belong to your parents and you are an extension and perpetuation of them by being born into and as a member of their personal family and national family.  The same principle is involved in both, and that’s why the word “natural” applies to both.

Those three understandings of citizenship are akin to a panoramic photograph composed of three separate but overlapping photos. The photo on the left (the obot frame) is akin to the two elements of alien parents (on its left side) and native-birth on its right side .

The center photo is composed of native-birth over-lapping the left photo on its left, with citizen parents on the right (the nativist frame).

The right photo is composed of citizen parents on the left and an unbounded background to the far horizon on the right (the natural law frame). Those are the only views of what a natural born citizen might be.  Only one is correct.

Two cannot be correct because its meaning is determined by a natural principle and not an arbitrary assignment of convenience or preference.  Its meaning is not determined by a fictional term of legal artifice which can mean whatever one can semi-logically justify.  It is determined by the meaning of common English words, -words that can be and were focused on individually, and not welded all together as a monolithic unitary term.

But two of the three views assert that that is false, -that “natural born citizen” is equivalent to naturalborncitizen, -a term for which both sides have a definition, albeit one in semi-opposition to its opposing counter view.

Both agree that those words must be defined by their dogma alone, with one side insisting that the parents must be Americans and the birth must be in America, -while the other insists that it doesn’t matter; only that their child is a citizen from birth, regardless of how or where that citizenship was obtained, -whether from two American parents, or only one, (at home or abroad) or none (with native-birth required for children of aliens).

That’s a hodge-podge of circumstances connected only by citizenship results. Both have inherent errors.  One side insists on native-birth when it has no need to nor any logical basis for doing so, while the other insists that American parents are irrelevant, -only legal citizenship is relevant, even though such citizenship was not endorsed as legitimate by the federal government until the Wong holding was issued over a century after the nation was founded. Until then the national government only endorsed recognition of a single nationality, -not dual nationality because that could lead to an international conflict of jurisdictions.

After the Wong opinion was issued, that became unavoidable, and only then was the national government forced to deal with dual-citizenship. Those who assert that the President of the United States can be a dual-citizen by blood (not birth location), born of an immigrant or even a non-immigrant alien, do so on the faith and insistence that the English term “natural born subject” was simply adjusted into the American term “natural born citizen”, -but that has errors of logic.

The first is the assumption that the English term was in common use when there was no reason for that to be so.  It was a needed term for some time after the Calvin case in the beginning of the 1600s in order to badger the natural subjects of England into accepting the alien-born in Britain as being their co-equal subjects.

The success of that effort is seen in the calamity that grips Britain today, with very alien people from far away alien places being granted residency in Britain as if they were equivalent to all natural born Englishmen and women in every way, meaning culturally, philosophically, politically, religiously, etc.  Their equality campaign begun in the 1600s has turned into a monster that is ruining their nation.

Once everyone got over having to accept the alien-born as equals, then the practice of labeling them with the same description as those born of Englishmen (natural born subject) could be allowed to wither.  In time, (perhaps a generation or more), people would have returned to simply using the term “subject”, -or in an international context; “British subject”.  There was no purpose served to use added verbiage since it contributed nothing and wasn’t needed to differentiate who was allowed to be King and who wasn’t.  That was determined not by election but by blood, royal blood.

So to believe that the term “natural born subject” was is use by any other than lawyers dealing with nationality cases is absurd.  So one can’t logically assert that the Americans simple switched from using the word “subject” to using “citizen” instead.  In fact, the Americans in general did not switch from using the term subject since it was ingrained into their psyche from birth.  In fact, three quarters of a century later, those schooled and steeped in British common law and statute law (along with colonial  & State law) were still using the term “subject” instead of “citizen”.

That reveals something important about the founders and their mind-set.  They had made a psychological, philosophical leap out of their establishment world-view and into another view entirely different in nature.  They abandoned and rejected the universal power and authority of Britain and her king and embraced in their place the principles of Natural Rights and human liberty.  Their view and their mental orientation underwent an enormous revolution, -one which did not begin in 1776 but in 1760.

That fact is fully illuminated by John Adams in a letter he wrote titled “ The Meaning of the American Revolution

Those whose minds were not revolutionized remained stuck in the bog of subjectship thinking, in which government was supreme and the people were subject.  But for those who escaped that obedient, loyal status quo mind-set, they shed the baggage that came with it, which included the British policy of nationality assignment and the unreal, artificial, fictional terminology that accompanied it.

It would be foolish to think that Americans were actually oblivious to the difference between those born of Belgium, Prussian, Polish, or French parents and those born of American parents.  Children of such parents were members of a family with a foreign culture and language.  Not noticing their differences would have been impossible.  So it is inconceivable that Americans would have thrown around the terms natural born subject or citizen indiscriminately without regard for the differences between alien-born children of foreign families and American-born children of American families.

They even marveled at how different citizens from some other States were. Think about it, under the British system, why would you call the child of an American couple a natural born subject and yet also call the child of alien parents a natural born subject?  Why not simplify it and just call them both simply “subjects”.  The one term lumped them together and there was no legal difference.  Both were subjects from birth.  With that naturally being the case, why would anyone use the terminology “natural born citizen” either?

Unless… there was a recognized difference of some significance which needed to be illuminated by using all three words.  Of course that difference was over who would and would not be eligible to be President. He had to be American citizen born. Otherwise, using “born citizen” or “born a citizen”, or “a common law citizen” or “native-born citizen” could have been used instead.

But none of those terms exclude sons of aliens.  None of those terms include exclusively the sons of Americans, -citizens by descent (-not by permission or mandate of government). With that being true, it is illogical and highly unlikely that the word “natural” just happens to imply that which would have served the purpose that the founders and framers sought; to avoid by all means the infiltration of foreign influence which would accompany the foreign-backed son of a foreigner, raised with foreign values and sentiments and attachments and loyalties; -and not allow such a one to grasp the scepter of power in America, the Command of the American military forces.

Such an association between their openly expressed concerns of foreign influence and the meaning of the word “natural” cannot reasonably be attributed to nothing but coincidence.  It had to be deliberate.  It makes perfect, irrefutable sense.

They meant to exclude all who were not born as natural citizens but instead were born with a foreign nationality by descent.

Barack Obama was and is neither of those since he was born solely as a British Commonwealth subject (which expired with his Kenyan provisional citizenship).  He was neither born of American parents nor born of foreign immigrants so he was not born as a common law, 14th Amendment, Wong-opinion citizen since his father, as a guest of the government, was not subject to its authority over citizens and legal immigrants, -and thus neither was he, -as required for common law 14th Amendment citizenship.

That only leaves him with Indonesian citizenship, which he probably allowed to lapse also since everyone assumed that he was an American citizen.  Well, he was and is an American, but that does not make him a citizen anymore than those brought here illegally as babies or small children and raised to be Americans. The United States is the only country they know, which makes them Americans.

But America is not the only country that Obama knows, in fact he knows Indonesia as his home, as well as Kenya, -which he and his wife have proclaimed upon visiting, and he’s fairly familiar with Pakistan, having lived there for perhaps a summer (hence his Islamophilia).

So today, the truth undoubtedly is that he is not officially a citizen of any nation on Earth.  Even if he could prove that he was born in Hawaii, he still would not only not be a natural born American citizen but not a citizen at all.  But, I’m willing to wager that he secretly has a Green Card and is a legal permanent resident of the United States, -obtained when he was a child after being transplanted back to Hawaii without any American birth certificate; only an Indonesia passport.  That likelihood is the reason for all of the highly questionable secrecy and fraudulence surrounding his official documents.

 by Adrien Nash  aka obama–


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