Same for my wife. When she was born, her mother was about ten years from becoming naturalized citizen.
So I guess my wife couldn't be Potus.
My father was born in Norway in 1921. His mother, left widowed at age 21, a week before my father was born and a year after her toddler daughter had died, we think from a late wave of “Spanish Fluâ€, left him behind in Norway with her parents when she immigrated to the US to make a new life for herself and later remarried another Norwegian immigrant. She later came back for him and brought him to the US in 1929.
My father did not have his US citizenship on December 8, 1941 when he, like so many other young men, and by this time my dad considered himself a red blooded American, a NY Yankees fan, his only accent being now that of a Northern New Jerseyite, tried to enlist for military duty. But he was not allowed to voluntarily enlist at the time because of his citizenship status.
But some eight months later he was drafted. I know that makes no sense but it happened that way. The thing was that my father had taken a job as an apprentice carpenter/maintenance worker for the NY Central railroad and because his job was considered essential war work, he could have taken a deferment but didn’t. He actually wanted to fight in Europe but because he had relatives in Nazi occupied Norway, he was sent to the SPT.
FWIW, his grandfather in Norway, the man who raised him for his first 6 years, was vehemently anti-Nazi/anti-Fascist and had to hide out with the Norwegian underground during the last year of occupation for printing anti-occupation/anti-Nazi leaflets using the printing press at the newspaper where he had worked as a typesetter and standing in the back yard of his house firing his pistol at German planes as they flew over his house among other resistance actions, resulting in the SS putting a warrant out for his arrest. Somehow my father's grandfather managed to get a few letters out of occupied Norway while in the remote mountain’s with the underground that made their way all the way to my dad in the SPT, telling him to kill some Fascist Japs for him and praising the US for killing those Nazi bastards.
And in the Pacific my father served with honor and distinction in an infantry unit, earning 2 Purple Hearts, and several commendations/metals for bravery in battle. Very near the end of the war, he was slightly wounded in a battle on some little island were 70% of his unit, including all the officers were killed in action after being ordered to take out a heavily fortified Japanese defense on top of a mountain that can be compared to Viet Nam’s Hamburger Hill – a futile and unnecessary order as a few days later it was taken out by aircraft bombs.
During the battle, he was given a “field†promotion to Master Sergeant and assumed command of the remaining unit and was instrumental in getting the remaining forces off of the field of slaughter. But to make matters worse, he contracted malaria and was given sulfa drugs which he was allergic to and almost died as a result. He always said “What the Japs failed to do (kill me), the US Army damned near succeededâ€.
After he came back he was bumped back to PFC with his increase in pay taken back, something he always resented and the reason he didn’t re-enlist after being approached to do so even with the promise of a raise in rank back to Master Sergeant with promises of a state side assignment training new troops as a drill Sargent. He told both my brother and me that he was glad he didn’t because if he had, he’d probably never met out mother and we’d never been born. Plus, as he also told us, he’d likely have ended up in the Korean War and believed he’d literally dodged the bullet too many times to tempt fate.
He was sent home on a hospital ship that was the first US military ship to steam under the San Francisco Bay Bridge after VJ Day. He was standing on the deck of the troop transport ship when it sailed under the bridge on his way over and swore that if he lived to return home, he’d be topside to see it again coming home. And he did. Even though he was still very weak, he talked a USN nurse into letting him go topside. She, who technically outranked him relented and gave him a heavy wool sweater and let him go. He related many times how cold it was and how thick the fog was but just as the ship came to the bridge the fog lifted and he saw all the cars had stopped, the people having gotten out to wave and wave US flags. He told me he cried tears of joy and also tears of sorrow thinking about all the good men he had served with who didn’t make it back home.
About a year after the war after spending some lost months drinking and partying too much, probably dealing with what we now know as PTSD, he met my mother and they married 3 months later. And he settled down and started a small business building houses and garages with a GI loan.
My brother was born in 1948 but my father did not become a naturalized citizen until 1949.
Both he and my mother who was there for the ceremony related that the judge conducing the swearing in ceremony told my father that in his opinion this was a merely a formality and that he considered that my father became a US citizen when he was inducted into the US Army in 1943 when swearing the military oath and having reviewed his military record, said he had more than earned his citizenship.
I was born in 1961 after my father became naturalized so I like to kid my older brother that I’m a true “natural born†citizen and eligible to be POTUS and he isn’t and can’t. But I’m joking because that is BS. My older brother is just as much as a US citizen as I am with all the same rights and privileges that come with that.
Under this line of thinking regarding who is “natural born citizen†keep in mind that only one of Trump’s children is eligible to become POTUS and that is (shudders) Tiffany because neither Ivana or Melania were naturalized citizens when their children with Trump were born.
There are only two types of US citizens – those who were born here (natural) and those who are not and have to become naturalized.
If there were some sort of 3 level of citizenship for those born to one or two parents who were foreign born and not naturalized citizens at the time of their children’s birth in the US, those children would have to go through some sort of naturalization process, and of course they don’t because there is no such distinction.
