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Comment by CurtHagenlocher | Hacker News Reader

I predict they'll argue that because he lived in Mexico from ages 1 to 16 that he effectively relinquished citizenship. Which is BS, of course, but I'm reminded of the Sartre quote "Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert."

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> I predict they'll argue that because he lived in Mexico from ages 1 to 16 that he effectively relinquished citizenship. Which is BS, of course...

Yeah. IIRC, that just means he can't pass his citizenship down to his foreign born children: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/travel-lega...:

> The U.S. citizen parent was physically present in the United States or its territories for five years before the child’s birth. At least two of these years must be after age 14.

Kind of nuts that there are different rules for out-of-wedlock US citizen father vs out-of-wedlock US citizen mother.

Doesn’t that violate the 14th amendment? Equal protection and all that?

> Kind of nuts that there are different rules for out-of-wedlock US citizen father vs out-of-wedlock US citizen mother.

Why? I think that's the historical standard. True maternity has always been easy to establish, but paternity had to rely on legal institutions and custom.

Indeed you couldn't really prove who the dad was in the past. I guess now with DNA you could.

Probably. But until someone challenges it in the Supreme Court, it stands.

According to the authors of the 14th amendment, the citizenship clause was meant to be retroactive, to right the wrongs of slavery, not a forward motion statute for the world.

Supreme Court to Debate Birthright Citizenship Case.

Are you stating that is true, or that that’s the argument the Trump administration is making right now?

Because the notion that the 14 amendment was supposed to be retroactive only is definitely not captured in some of those quotes here by the senators who debated it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_Clause

Holy wow are those rules complex.

What immediately drops out of them is that kids of diplomats must return physically to the US for 5 years to be able to pass on their citizenship to their progeny.

These are good rules, not bad. The point of having birthright citizenship is that we don't rely on a fuzzy, nationalist, often-slight-racist notion of "Americanness" or "American Blood" to define our citizenry. All persons born in the United States are citizens of the United States, easy peasy.

But then you need to close the loopholes around people who clearly haven't renounced citizenship and don't want to but still find themselves pregnant in foreign countries such that they don't need to make emergency trips back to the homeland. And that gets a little complicated because you need to distinguish them from actual expatriots in a fair way.

Or you can just buy a $5 Million Trump card and become a US Citizen.

If they are born abroad and then marry a non-citizen or a foreign-born citizen, then yes, it can get tricky. The safest is to return to the US to give birth, at which point there is no issue with passing on citizenship (for now, at least). Otherwise, it's possible that their child is stateless (happened to friends of mine, it took 2 years for them to get US citizenship for their child, who was otherwise stateless).

Did the kid actually have to acquire US citizenship via naturalization or did it just take 2 years to prove that they were a citizen? Those two cases are really different.

Even if you don’t have confirmation and proof that you are a citizen (eg by having a US passport), you are still bound by rules if you happen to be a citizen anyways (eg you have to file/pay US taxes). So a lot of kids find out later in life that they are actually natural born US citizens and have been evading US taxes illegally.

At least say contra to US law or something like that.

"You owe us money because of arcane rules" is a bad thing.

It was the latter, through I can’t recall how they managed to do it.

Nope, he was released. That this surprises some in this thread is strange, but hopefully they all pay attention.

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