Why Challenging Wong Kim Ark/14th Amendment Soil Citizenship is Essential, and Critical to the Question of Obama’s Article II Eligibility
Ask anyone, from average citizen to presidential candidate, and they will tell you birth on U.S. soil is all that is required to become a citizen at birth. They will also agree if you suggest that a citizen at birth is the same thing as a ‘natural born citizen.’
If pressed further, they will cite the 14th Amendment’s ‘born in the United States’ clause.
This blog article proves them WRONG.
The 14th Amendment’s “born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” clause was adapted directly from the 1866 Civil Rights Act as applying to children of black slaves emancipated by proclamation and the successful outcome of the Civil War. As property, slaves had no nationality and therefore their children were also stateless. The 14th Amendment and the 1866 Civil Rights Act guaranteed equal rights of U.S. citizenship by recognizing children of slaves and former slaves born on U.S. soil were “not subject to any foreign power,” and therefore solely ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States.
According to existing U.S. naturalization law, from 1790 through 1855, minor children of aliens were not U.S. citizens until their parents naturalized, i.e., renounced foreign jurisdiction over their nationality. (Citation omitted. See previous blogs for full text of law.)
However, in 1898 Wong Kim Ark misinterpreted that clause and inserted feudal English law as adjudicated in the 1608 Calvin’s Case, and practiced as a general principle by the American colonies until their First Uniform Naturalization Act of 1790 legislated in the first Congress of the United States.
The ‘soil birthright’ of citizenship declared by Wong Kim Ark (by ignoring the effect ‘under the jurisdiction thereof’ has on nationality law) created our illegal immigration and chain migration, a problem to such an extent that illegal immigration has become the de facto method of immigration. Legal immigration statistics in 2010 show only 1.04 million Legal Permanent Residents[1] on the road to naturalization. In comparison, illegal immigration has been estimated to be 13 million in 2000, increasing 500,000 annually.
Conclusion: The Wong Kim Ark decision destroyed U.S. naturalization law through violation of constitutional law, jurisprudence, and existing legislated act, thus creating the illegal immigration problem. Chain migration out of illegal immigration is the de facto method; legal immigration practically extinct. Wong Kim Ark[2] is followed law, but invalid and must be overturned by congress.
It is also why most Americans and ‘experts’ automatically think Obama is a ‘natural born citizen’ merely by his claim of Hawaiian birth. [Obama’s claim to Hawaiian birth is an unwitnessed Certification of Live Birth. However, that document is a record made under Haw. Stat. § 338-17.8, reserved for registering live infants whose births are not witnessed in a licensed birthing facility. The ‘Certificate of Birth,’ witnessed, published by the Obama White House April 27, 2011, was almost immediately determined to be a forgery, compiled in Adobe Illustrator. Apparently, the forger forgot to ‘flatten’ the image, and all the manipulations and ‘art layers’ were preserved in the ‘history.’ The only ‘witnessed’ birth documents remaining are the ones purported to be from Kenya.
The Transition from Jus Soli
For over a century, the American colonies were limited to children born on their soil being natural born subjects under the British monarch. From ancient times, jus soli was the eternal allegiance from birth of a child to the protection, ‘within ligeance,’ of the King.
However, with the Magna Carta (1200s), permanent allegiance from birth was disavowed, and the right of children of subjects born outside British territory to be natural born British subjects children was provided by law as far back as 1350. See the (1351 Edwardian statute.(
The 1772 British Nationality Act declared children born of British subjects outside the ‘ligeance’ of the crown be natural born subjects;[3] and that is the law that we must apply to Obama’s birth circumstances. (See quotes below on ‘originalist’ interpretation of the constitution.)
Natural Born Citizen in U.S. Law
The term of art, Natural Born Citizen, appears in the constitution once, as applied to elements of qualifications of eligibility of a presidential candidate. Similarly, the term of art appeared only once in a Supreme Court holding, defining it ‘without doubt’ as children born of two U.S. citizens.[4]
Unfortunately, the term of art ‘natural born citizen’ has become ‘idiomatic’ with a meaning diluted by both time and judicial error, as merely born in the United States. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison warned of such error:
On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed. –Thomas Jefferson to William Johnson, 1823
In a letter to Henry Lee on June 25, 1824, James Madison wrote:
. . . I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution.
Madison continued, acknowledging the “changes to which the words and phrases of all living languages are constantly subject”, he stated:
What a metamorphosis would be produced in the code of law if all its ancient phraseology were to be taken in its modern sense.
Born, or Naturalized?
Under U.S. law, a citizen at birth may be solely of U.S. citizenship (natural born citizen), or a 14th Amendment citizen at birth as interpreted by Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898). The first is a citizen born. The second is naturalized because the alien nationality of one or both parents must be removed by application of the Aliens and Nationality Act, as revised after 1855.
Nevertheless, Wong Kim Ark did not, nor could not, revise Article II’s natural born citizen clause, nor the common knowledge of the framers as to what constituted a ‘natural born citizen,’ or what laws created a British natural born subject if born on U.S. soil.
Therefore, there is no valid interpretation of law that makes Barack Hussein Obama, II a natural born citizen as intended by the U.S. Constitution, Article II, Sec. I, Clause 5.
The Civil Rights Act became a law April 9, 1866 (14 Stat. 27, c. 31), and provided:
That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.
And this was reenacted June 22, 1874, in the Revised Statutes, section 1992.
The words “not subject to any foreign power” do not, in themselves, refer to mere territorial jurisdiction, for the persons referred to are persons born in the United States. All such persons are undoubtedly subject to the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, and yet the act concedes that nevertheless they may be subject to the political jurisdiction of a foreign government. In other words, by the terms of the act, all persons born in the United States, and not owing allegiance to any foreign power, are citizens.
[2] Wong Kim Ark (1898) is followed law, but in conflict with precedent in Minor vs. Happersett (1875) as well as legislated act, if not the 14th Amendment itself, specifically ignoring the ‘jurisdiction’ clause, and Sec. 5 reserving enforcement of provisions of the amendment by congress, not the judiciary.
[3] “That all Persons born, or who hereafter shall be born, out of the Ligeance of the Crown of England, or of Great Britain, whose Fathers were or shall be, by virtue of a Statute made in the Fourth Year of King George the Second, to explain a Clause in an Act made in the Seventh Year of the Reign of Her Majesty Queen Anne, for naturalizing Foreign Protestants, which relates to the natural-born Subjects of the Crown of England, or of Great Britain, intitled to all the Rights and Privileges of natural-born Subjects of the Crown of England or of Great Britain, shall and may be adjudged and taken to be, and are hereby declared and enacted to be, natural-born Subjects of the Crown of Great Britain, to all Intents, Constructions, and Purposes whatsoever, as if he and they had been and were born in this Kingdom . . .” British Nationality Act, 1772, 1772 (13 Geo. 3) C A P. XXI
[4] “This is apparent from the Constitution itself, for it providesthat “no person except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President,” and that Congress shall have power “to establish a uniform rule of naturalization.” Thus new citizens may be born or they may be created by naturalization.
The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. 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.” Minor vs. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875)
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