{"id":1275,"date":"2013-07-25T19:53:45","date_gmt":"2013-07-25T19:53:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.doingbusinessacrossborders.com\/?p=1275"},"modified":"2013-07-25T19:53:45","modified_gmt":"2013-07-25T19:53:45","slug":"citizenship-series-the-qualified-cases-of-birthright-citizenship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.flottco.com\/doingbusinessacrossborders\/citizenship-series-the-qualified-cases-of-birthright-citizenship\/","title":{"rendered":"Citizenship Series \u2013 The Qualified Cases of Birthright Citizenship"},"content":{"rendered":"

This discussion of US citizenship is intended to cover persons who reside outside the United States and are uncertain about their US citizenship status.[1]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 Essentially, those who were born in the United States are citizens.\u00a0 Those who were born outside the United States to one or two US citizen parents are certainly entitled to US citizenship, assuming they or their parents can prove the requisite \u201cresidence\u201d or \u201cphysical presence\u201d required by the INA provision applicable to their situation. In complicated situations, the US Congress has ultimate authority to determine the US citizenship of persons born outside the United States to US citizen parents.<\/p>\n

Section 301 of The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (\u201cINA\u201d)[2]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> defines who \u201cshall be nationals[3]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> and citizens of the United States at birth\u201d.\u00a0 Subsection (a) simply repeats the words of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment without the reference to naturalization.\u00a0 Subsection (b) contains a specific provision which extends citizenship to \u201ca person born in the United States to a member of an Indian, Eskimo, Aleutian or other aboriginal tribe\u201d without depriving such persons of their rights to tribal citizenship or other property.\u00a0 Interestingly, these two subsections refer to \u201ca person born in the United States\u201d and do not include any reference to \u201cpersons born in its outlying possessions\u201d.\u00a0 That phrase, which also does not appear in Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, does appear in other subsections of Section 301 to define persons who are considered US citizens at birth.<\/p>\n

Section 301(c) covers \u201ca person born outside of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents both of whom are citizens of the United States and one of whom had a residence in the United States or one of its possessions, prior to the birth of such person.\u201d\u00a0 This begins a series of provisions that limit the scope of \u201ccitizenship at birth\u201d within the overall concept of jus sanguinis <\/i>or citizenship \u201cby right of blood\u201d.\u00a0 In this case, if both child\u2019s parents are US citizens but neither one \u201chad a residence\u201d in the United States prior to the child\u2019s birth, their children are not US citizens at birth.<\/p>\n


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[1]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a>There are other provisions of the INA that address the citizenship of people who reside in the US, such as the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 (Pub. L. No. 106-395, 114 Stat. 1631 (October 30, 2000), but they are not relevant to this article.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[2]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a>The INA is codified under Title 8, Aliens and Nationality, of the US Code.\u00a0 Section 301 of the INA is codified as 8 USC 1401 and so on.\u00a0 Before the INA was enacted, a variety of statutes governed immigration to the US but they were not organized within one body of text.\u00a0 The INA was the first major overhaul of US immigration laws since the late 1800\u2019s and replaced all prior immigration laws.\u00a0 Passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Supreme Court\u2019s decision in the Wong Kim Ark<\/i> case limited the role Congress could play in determining US citizenship of persons born in the United States.\u00a0 As can be seen, Congress did extend the scope of citizenship by birth to persons born outside the United States proper by legislation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[3]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a>The term \u201cnational\u201d is not synonymous with \u201ccitizen\u201d.\u00a0 Section 308 extends nationality without citizenship to persons who are born in one of two US possessions (American Samoa and Swains Island) or through descent from a person born in one of those two possessions.\u00a0 Guam, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands fell into the same category until granted full citizenship by Congress (see INA Sections 302, 306, and 307).\u00a0 People who are US nationals may live and work in the United States without restriction, but cannot vote or hold elective office.\u00a0 They may apply for citizenship under the same rules as resident aliens.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This discussion of US citizenship is intended to cover persons who reside outside the United States and are uncertain about their US citizenship status.[1]\u00a0 Essentially, those who were born in the United States are citizens.\u00a0 Those who were born outside the United States to one or two US citizen parents are certainly entitled to US…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-citizenship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flottco.com\/doingbusinessacrossborders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flottco.com\/doingbusinessacrossborders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flottco.com\/doingbusinessacrossborders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flottco.com\/doingbusinessacrossborders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flottco.com\/doingbusinessacrossborders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.flottco.com\/doingbusinessacrossborders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flottco.com\/doingbusinessacrossborders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flottco.com\/doingbusinessacrossborders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flottco.com\/doingbusinessacrossborders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}