But, it appears it is.
In the famous Slaughter-House cases of 1872, the Supreme Court stated that this qualifying phrase was intended to exclude “children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.” This was confirmed in 1884 in another case, Elk vs. Wilkins, when citizenship was denied to an American Indian because he “owed immediate allegiance to” his tribe and not the United States.
What’s the citizenship status of the children of illegal aliens? That question has spurred quite a debate over the 14th Amendment lately, with the news that several states—including Pennsylvania, Arizona, Oklahoma, Georgia, and South Carolina—may launch efforts to deny automatic citizenship to...
www.heritage.org
The "citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the U.S." are Diplomats, Ambassadors, Foreign State leaders, Kings and Queens, Royal Family and are given diplomatic immunity and not subject to our governing jurisdiction while on our soil that would be otherwise under our jurisdiction.
Justice Joseph Story, famously known for his shaping of the Judiciary and realms of constitutional law with Chief Justice John Marshall...a founding father, is still cited today for his rulings and writings.
In one of his decisions for a case at the time, (all before the civil war) he defined and explained the exceptions to the "All Persons" and the "Subject to our jurisdiction" part that the Civil Rights bill and 14th Amendment later adopted in their wording.
Pre-Amendment citizenship law
edit
Before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, the antebellum United States generally embraced the common-law doctrine of citizenship by birth within the country. Justice Joseph Story described the rule in Inglis v. Trustees of Sailor's Snug Harbor:
The rule commonly laid down in the books is, that every person who is born within the ligeance of a sovereign is a subject; and, e converso, that every person born without such allegiance is an alien. . . . Two things usually concur to create citizenship; first, birth locally within the dominions of the sovereign; and secondly, birth within the protection and obedience, or in other words, within the ligeance of the sovereign. That is, the party must be born within a place where the sovereign is at the time in full possession and exercise of his power, and the party must also at his birth derive protection from, and consequently owe obedience or allegiance to the sovereign, as such, de facto.
Story excluded children of ambassadors and the children of occupying enemy soldiers from those eligible for citizenship under the common law. But the rule also applied only to the people born of "free persons," thus excluding the children of slaves. The rule also excluded the children of Native Americans living in tribes, on the reasoning that they were born under the dominion of their tribes, and not within the purview of the law of the United States.
--------------------------
Outside the above categories, the rule was generous in scope. One antebellum treatise, by William Rawle, stated: "Therefore every person born within the United States, its territories or districts, whether the parents are citizens or aliens, is a natural born citizen in the sense of the Constitution, and entitled to all the rights and privileges appertaining to that capacity."
In the 1844 New York case of Lynch v. Clarke, the court held that the common law doctrine applied in the United States, and ruled that a child born in the country of a temporary visitor was a natural-born citizen under this rule.
Again, citizenship at birth was common practice prior to the civil war with just the few exceptions.
Now granted, the founders would have had no conception of what we call
illegal aliens today, or that we could be concerned about birthright citizenship....to them it went hand in hand with being a NATURAL born citizen vs a Naturalized through laws citizen... since they are the ones who introduced birthright citizenship with a person's qualification to be a US President....imo....
They had lived under common law which covered birthright citizenship under the jurisdiction laws, for a couple of hundred years in America already, before the Revolution.
The founders understood why it was so important to continue with birthright citizenship after we became a Constitutional Republic....
They understood the language and terms that we now are debating today.
They simply, imo, could not for see today's times...again, I'll give you that...
But this also for me, is the reason why I believe the Supreme court will end up ruling, that a constitutional amendment is needed to change it... to ...mean, what y'all falsely claim it means already.
