The number of people that don’t know this is… Distressing.
This was literally middle-school shit for me.
If you were either born in the US–which (usually) makes you a citizen by birthright–or are born to parents that are citizens, you are almost always eligible. (There are some weird edge cases about citizenship, but they’re extremely rare.)
Yeah it was to most people I think.
But since anti-intellectualism has gotten so popular, people have this idea that learning is stupid and makes you uncool. So they hate school and reject information.
What I learned in school was natural born means born in the USA.
It wasn’t until Cheney that I learned that it also meant parents of citizens or born on a US Base.
Just goes to show that school systems are janky when it comes to history.
Wasn’t Mitt Romney born in Mexico? And nobody even cared when he was running.
Mitt Romney was born in the US, but his father was a Mexican citizen.
I think that being born to US citizens, on or off a US base, is usually sufficient to be a US citizen, but it depends on residency. It gets a little tricky at the margins, and it’s the sort of thing that you’d need to take up with the US State Dept.
I know that for people that have dual-citizen parents, but have never lived in the US, it can get challenging.
