“Are you a US citizen? Then yeah. You are qualified to be the president.”
Why, or what did the Founders have in mind, then, when they specified the requirement to be a natural born citizen to be president? The term citizen was used anywhere else.
And why were generations of Americans taught that natural born citizen meant born of citizen parents? I was taught that in high school and college and that was not too long ago.
An American born anywhere on earth is a natural born citizen as long as his parents are citizens.
When we were debating this here about Obama, I found an old textbook that defined what a natural born citizen was and bought it. I went looking for it the other day, but it seems like my wife might have thrown it out. The definition used when the textbook was written was definitely not the anything goes interpretation that people are insisting on these days.
One of the kids that I grew up with was born here but had parents who were Canadians. He had dual citizenship and said that if he was drafted, he would be moving back to Canada. We live near the border and I have known many people who have "dual citizenship".
My understanding has always been that the natural born citizenship requirement for president was to protect the country against those who might have allegiances to countries other than the United States.
Persons born here who have non-citizen parents obviously have allegiances to countries other than the United States. Many of them actually are raised outside of the United States. We have many people whose mothers came to the United States to give birth to their children and then went back home. Many don't even speak English. It is called "birth tourism" and is very common. Do you consider these kids “natural born citizens”?