As we all know, the Constitution is not a dictionary. But, if a person was born in a country of two citizen parents of that country, what could that person be but a natural born citizen?
Any other scenario you try to fit, is a legal construction, not natural law.
Absolutely Larry - Moe and Curly. The Constitution is not a dictionary. But more important is the reason for that construction. Some involvement in astrophysics caused a casual introduction to the notion of ‘time invariance.’ Decades ago I thought “obviously.” Now I see how essential was that principle.
When doing physics the tools assume the modern physical principles with which we are familiar. Looking back twenty billion years and trying to understand the phenomena means nothing unless we assume that physical principles then were the same as those with which we are familiar today. That is why our framers, and Madison in particular, stipulated that interpretation of the Constitution needed to use the langurage familiar to our framers. We had some brilliant men translating natural law and the Laws of Nations into laws appropriate to making and keeping individuals sovereign citizens, and not subject to a monarch or dictator.
A casual comment from a journal dedicated to another of the philosophers of the enlightenment, Hugo Grotius, caught my attention. The author cited the popularity of Vattel, and provided data, actual counts of citations to Law of Nations in US courts. Citations to Vattel dominated all other sources, as a casual glance at Marshall's writing in The Venus, and Jefferson's decision to make Law of Nations by Vattel our first law book at our first law school are examples of the Grotian Society reference. Hamilton's letters to Washington are filled with citations to Vattel. Biographers noted, and records confirm, that Law of Nations was the first book in President Washington's office in 1789 was borrowed from a New York lending library, since Washington's belongings had not yet reached our first capital. (Someone calculated the overdue penalty since Washington never returned the borrowed copy.)
Our framers were reaching for rigor. It caught my attention that Vattel’s principal influence was the work of Gottlieb Leibniz, one, with Issac Newton, of the mathematicians who created the calculus. Our Constitution reflects an effort to base the new nation on an axiomatic foundation based upon natural law. That is explicitly stated in our Declaration of Independence. Without a fixed foundation axiomatic legal construction is meaningless. The English, for example, have no Constitution. The titled ruling class writes the laws to protect itself.
If one goes to the foundations of mathematics, truth is simply, according to Descartes, “clear and distinct to the human reason.” Mathematics is based upon intuition. That a child inherits the allegiances of the father (parents, since the mother was assumed to follow the father - which many today would question), is one of those principles which most human beings have accepted as a foundational truth - natural law.
So the Constitution is not a dictionary, but not fixing the definition renders it meaningless. Words are assumed to mean what most people thought they meant, and Vattel was the most widely used and accepted source for legal definitions. Just count the incidents of “Vattel said” in Supreme Court decisions for the fifty years or so from 1787, or just glance at John Marshalls contribution to The Venus, 12 US 253, (1814).
That is not a logical answer.