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Citizenship Truths Learned from Apples and Antarctica

August 28, 2013 Leave a comment

So you’re an American citizen, and quite sure about that fact, and yet do you even know why that is a fact? No doubt you don’t since none of us was taught the truth because of its replacement by a wide-spread “urban myth” about the mechanism beneath the hood that determines one’s nationality.
We, like those who came before us, only know the facts (we are Americans and we were born in America) but do not understand what it is that connects the one fact with the other, or if they are even related. Is there a relationship of Cause & Effect? Or no relationship at all?
We grow up with an impression that seems perfectly reasonable and yet it is wrong anyway. We view the matter like people from bygone centuries would view the “Back To The Future” car of Marty McFly if it were a modern electric car. They would quickly make the assumption the what makes it go is pushing on a pedal on the floor. Push the pedal and it goes, -silently and without hesitation. What could be simpler?
But pushing the pedal is not what empowers it since that would be trunk full of high capacity batteries. So it is with citizenship. It is not empowered by the pedal-pushing equivalent event in one’s personal history, – namely the event and location of one’s birth within American boundaries.
Just as McFly’s DeLorean does not go simply because a foot pushes a pedal, so also, your nationality is not determined by the unrelated fact of where your mother was located when she delivered you. Simple Cause & Effect is not the determinant in either situation. That can be illustrated via:

The Antarctica Scenario

If your mother had been a meteorologist who got pregnant the night before shipping out for a nine month sojourn in a science station in Antarctica, and you were born there since no flights could land due to the extreme weather, what nationality would you possess with Antarctica as your “homeland”? Would it be “none” since no nation owns the continent? Would you be a stateless person? Or would you be born with your mother’s nationality? Would your nationality be determined by national law, international law, or natural law?
The answer would depend on when you were born and who your mother was and whether or not your father was acknowledged openly by her or married to her. If he was not, then you would be a natural American citizen if she was an American. If he was, then that might change the nature of your citizenship.
If he was an alien from a nation that recognizes jus sanguinis citizenship (by right of blood) then you would be born with provisional citizenship in his foreign nation but with legal citizenship in the United States via Congressional statute. The statute that would allow your mother’s nationality to pass to you did not exist about 75 years ago. Back then you would not have been an American citizen, only a foreigner like your father.
If he was from a nation that only recognizes jus soli citizenship (by right of soil) then you would be only an American, unless born before the first statute was passed back in the first half of the 20^th Century. In that event you would be a stateless person. A citizen of the world belonging to no nation on Earth.
But if your father was an American, you would be an American also. That would be true automatically, unavoidably, irrevocably. You would be what he is or was because he was your head, your sovereign, your boss and your owner. Every child produced by him would be the same as him, -and even more so if he and your mother were children of the same nation. In that case you would be born as a natural member of their country and a natural citizen of the United States. You would be a born natural citizen, -in other words; “a natural born citizen” (as the Constitution requires of all American Presidents).
In that case, Antarctica would not be your homeland because it was not the homeland of your mother and father. You would be a member of their country because you belonged to them and they belonged to it. The same bond that connected you to them connected you to the People, -the society, -the country & nation of which they were a part. That bond has no connection to geography nor borders. It is a human bond and not an artificial man-made artifice that determines something as fundamental as your identity in this world (vis a vis the people of other nations).
That bond is inviolable. The American government possesses no authority to do anything about it except to protect and defend it against a failure to recognize it. It can not rescind nor abrogate it because it does not “own” any rights to it. You, the citizen, own the full rights to your citizenship, -not the government.
You can abandon it if you wish, and the War of 1812 was fought to defend the right of all men to choose which nation they would voluntarily belong to, but the government does not have the authority to make that decision. Why not? Because the founding fathers understood that the creation can’t be trusted with the power to disenfranchise its creators and bosses, thereby giving it the power to be a god and not a servant.
The American CITIZENS were to be the Lord and ruler over the government, but it hasn’t turned out that way. Nevertheless, the fundamental principle that determines United States citizenship has not changed regardless of the fact that it is no longer recognized by the vast majority of American citizens.
Ignorance does not alter reality anymore than ignorance of what propels the Time traveling car has any effect on its propulsion system. You are an American because your parents were Americans and that fact is not altered by the location of your birth. Treating one’s irrelevant birth location as some hallowed, inescapable power is like placing a Scarlet Letter on one for life, for good or for evil, for benefit or for disadvantage. It’s no different from determining one’s nationality by race or religion or ethnic origin. It takes an observed fact and makes it SUPREME in the bonded relationship that will define one all of one’s normal life, only in a much more ridiculous manner than by using race or religion or ethnicity because they are things that are on-going facts throughout life, but the location of birth is a totally transient thing, and one is not consigned to that spot for life, nor to that nation for life, (-unless born in a dictatorship).

The Apple Analogy

On my property there are four apple trees of three different varieties, and that situation is highly analogous to nationality. Two are analogous to natural citizenship, while the others are analogous to citizenship via naturalization and to native-born citizenship granted to children of foreigners via the 14^th Amendment. Two of the varieties of apples are not as desirable as the other one. One is the least desirable, it being only good for cooking with lots of added sugar, -analogous to naturalized citizenship in a sense.
Another is in the middle, good for juicing and cooking but not good for eating. It’s analogous to native-born, alien-fathered citizenship. The other two trees are of the same variety and they are analogous to natural citizenship since they are good for cooking, juicing and eating.
The framers of the Constitution wanted the kind of citizen that was most desirable to serve as Commander-in-Chief of the American military, and that type was one which was all-American. One with no foreign influence, connection, bond, attachment, loyalty, allegiance, affection or affinity acquired through a father who was a loyal subject of his foreign King.
They wanted one born of an American father who would instill in his son strong American anti-monarchy, pro-Liberty values. No foreign father could be assumed to do that and so no foreigner-born son could be fully trusted with the military power of the United States Army.
The two trees of the same desirable type are right at the property line. If one of them was over the property line a bit, I might have run the back fence enclosing my property around its far side putting it inside of my control. No one would care because that property is uninhabited wilderness.
In that case, it would be outside of my territory but within my jurisdiction. That is analogous to the American child of an American mother and father being born over the border line. Under which nation’s control is the child considered to exist? The child belongs to the parents and they belong to their own nation, and so the child also belongs to their nation via its natural connection to them and it.
The property line doesn’t determine who the fruit belongs to when half of it is hanging over my property. The boundary means nothing in that regard, just as a nation’s borders mean nothing when it comes to the children of its members.
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