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.
Doesn’t that violate the 14th amendment? Equal protection and all that?
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.
Supreme Court to Debate Birthright Citizenship Case.
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:
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.
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.
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.
"You owe us money because of arcane rules" is a bad thing.