Schwarzenegger 2020: Equal Opportunity to Govern

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by aesir23

Obama's mother was a US citizen, born in Kansas. If I'm understanding things correctly, he would be a natural born US citizen whether he was born in a US state, a US territory (as Hawaii was until 1959), a foreign country (like Kenya or Indonesia), or anywhere else.

Citizenship has always been messily defined pretty much everywhere. There have been people born to US Citizen parents who have been found not to be citizens in actual court cases. Most of those loopholes have been closed since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - the 1948 UN treaty that asserts everyone has a right to a nationality - but it wouldn't surprise me if there are some left, and most presidential candidates are still people born before 1948. Exactly what constitutes "natural born" has apparently never actually been seriously tested in court.