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Leo Donofrio hit the jackpot....

Britsh common law and the constitution:

The term “natural born” citizen has a long history in British common law.(38) In fact, a law passed in 1677 law says that “natural born” citizens include people born overseas to British citizens. This usage was undoubtedly known to John Jay, who had children born overseas while he was serving as a diplomat.(39) It also appears to have been employed by the members of the first Congress, who included many of the people who had participated in the Constitutional Convention. To be specific, The Naturalization Act of 1790, which was passed by this Congress, declared “And the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens; Provided, that the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident of the United States.”(40)

This history suggests that the Founding Fathers used the term “natural born” as an expansive definition of citizenship, that is, as a way to make certain that people born overseas to American citizens would have the full rights of other American citizens.(41)

A particularly compelling version of this interpretation, with language that applies, inadvertently, no doubt, to foreign-born adoptees, can be found in an article written almost 100 years ago by Alexander Porter Morse.(42) He writes that by drawing on the term so well known from English law, the Founders were recognizing “the law of hereditary, rather than territorial allegiance.”(43) In other words, they were drawing on the English legal tradition, which protected allegiance to the king by conferring citizenship on all children “whose fathers were natural-born subjects,” regardless of where the children were born.(44) Thus, according to Morse, “the framers thought it wise, in view of the probable influx of European immigration, to provide that the President should at least be the child of citizens owing allegiance to the United States at the time of his birth.”(45) He goes on to say that the presidential eligibility clause “was scarcely intended to bar the children of American parentage, whether born at sea or in foreign territory.... A natural-born citizen has been defined as one whose citizenship is established by the jurisdiction which the United States already has over the parents of the child, not what is thereafter acquired by choice of residence in this country.”(46