Cruz Replies to Eligibility Question with “Immigration” Answer

“THE SON OF A CUBAN IMMIGRANT”

by Sharon Rondeau, h/t Reader

(May 27, 2015) — Because of his physical birth in Canada, presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz was born a citizen of that country.  Cruz claims to have also been born a U.S. citizen and thereby maintains that he is a “natural born Citizen” eligible to seek the presidency under Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution.

The “natural born Citizen” clause in the Constitution appears to have been included to preclude foreign influence over the chief executive of the nation.  Various statements, commentaries and U.S. Supreme Court case opinions have referred to a “natural born Citizen” as having been born in the U.S. to citizen parents.

According to The Dallas Morning News’s Todd J. Gillman, Cruz’s campaign is relying on commentary issued by former Solicitors General Paul Clement and Neal Katyal, who respectively worked in politically-divergent administrations and maintain that Cruz, by virtue of his birth to a US-citizen mother, is a “natural born Citizen.”

In closing their article at the Harvard Law Review published a week before Cruz declared himself a candidate, Katyal and Clement wrote, “…as Congress has recognized since the Founding, a person born abroad to a U.S. citizen parent is generally a U.S. citizen from birth with no need for naturalization. And the phrase ‘natural born Citizen’ in the Constitution encompasses all such citizens from birth. Thus, an individual born to a U.S. citizen parent — whether in California or Canada or the Canal Zone — is a U.S. citizen from birth and is fully eligible to serve as President if the people so choose.”

The two former solicitors general further opined that “The less time spent dealing with specious objections to candidate eligibility, the better.”

In response to an email sent to Cruz via the contact form on his website questioning his constitutional eligibility given his birth in Canada to a non-U.S.-citizen father, a reader recently received the following:

Dear XXXXXXXX,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts regarding immigration issues.  Input from fellow Texans significantly informs my decision-making and empowers me to better represent the state.

America has a proud history of welcoming immigrants from around the world, and as the son of a Cuban immigrant, I believe the United States should be a nation that celebrates legal immigrants who come here to pursue the American Dream.  But our current system is broken, and the flawed legislation that the Senate passed in 2013 would have only done further harm by failing to secure our border and establishing a special path to citizenship that would only encourage more illegal immigration.

President Obama has further compounded our problems through his illegal executive actions granting amnesty, which defies the will of the American people, disadvantages legal immigrants, jeopardizes our nation’s security, and endangers the children who are being brought across our borders by violent criminals, drug cartels, and sex traffickers.

The President’s executive amnesty exacerbates the crisis at our border and earlier this year Senate Democrats filibustered funding for the Department of Homeland Security to protect this amnesty that was declared illegal by a federal court.  In order to keep America strong, I will honor my commitment to continue opposing the President’s amnesty and I will continue working to reform our immigration system to secure our borders, provide American business with a streamlined system for hiring immigrant labor, and uphold the rule of law.

Thank you again for sharing your views with me. Please feel free to contact me in the future about any issue important to your family. It is an honor to serve you and the people of Texas.

For Liberty,

Senator Ted Cruz

 

After sending us the return letter from Cruz’s office, the reader told us:

I suspect that anyone who writes to Cruz about his ineligibility will get a similar response about immigration.  His staff must have a catalog of canned responses from which they select the best choice. Obviously they don’t have a standard response for the most important question of all.

I’m not from Texas but the form letters don’t provide an option for email to non constituents.  Ironically, I was just a few feet in front of Cruz when he addressed an anti-Obamacare rally on the Capitol front lawn in September 2013.

Obama himself was called “an immigrant” by former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson during the 2008 presidential campaign.  Richardson’s statement, captured by a French television station on video, curiously appears at Google’s website as an error.  Google is known to be friendly with the Obama regime.

In determining the meaning of “natural born Citizen,” neither Katyal, Clement, nor the mainstream media has cited “The Law of Nations” of Emmerich de Vattel, a Swiss philosopher whose work is known to have strongly influenced the Framers of the Constitution.

In Section 212 of his treatise, Vattel states:

The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its advantages. The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens. As the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights. The society is supposed to desire this, in consequence of what it owes to its own preservation; and it is presumed, as matter of course, that each citizen, on entering into society, reserves to his children the right of becoming members of it. The country of the fathers is therefore that of the children; and these become true citizens merely by their tacit consent. We shall soon see whether, on their coming to the years of discretion, they may renounce their right, and what they owe to the society in which they were born. I say, that, in order to be of the country, it is necessary that a person be born of a father who is a citizen; for, if he is born there of a foreigner, it will be only the place of his birth, and not his country.

Section 220 states:

§ 220. Whether a person may quit his country.

Many distinctions will be necessary, in order to give a complete solution to the celebrated question, whether a man may quit his country or the society of which he is a member.(60) — 1. The children are bound by natural ties to the society in which they were born; they are under an obligation to show themselves grateful for the protection it has afforded to their fathers, and are in a great measure indebted to it for their birth and education. They ought, therefore, to love it, as we have already shown (§ 122), to express a just gratitude to it, and requite its services as far as possible, by serving it in turn. We have observed above (§ 212), that they have a right to enter into the society of which their fathers were members. But every man is born free; and the son of a citizen, when come to the years of discretion, may examine whether it be convenient for him to join the society for which he was destined by his birth. If he does not find it advantageous to remain in it, he is at liberty to quit it, on making it a compensation for what it has done in his favour,¹ and preserving, as far as his new engagements will allow him, the sentiments of love and gratitude he owes it. A man’s obligations to his natural country may, however, change, lessen, or entirely vanish, according as he shall have quitted it lawfully, and with good reason, in order to choose another, or has been banished from it deservedly or unjustly, in due form of law or by violence.

In August 2013,  The Dallas Morning News published what it said was a copy of Cruz’s birth certificate which showed that he was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada on December 22, 1970, to Rafael Bienvenido Cruz and Eleanor Elizabeth Wilson. The elder Cruz had sought political asylum in the United States as a refugee during the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and Wilson was reportedly born in Delaware and a U.S. citizen.

Rafael Cruz, however, sought and obtained Canadian citizenship while he and his wife were working in the oil industry during the late 1960s and early 1970s, as he revealed in a 2013 interview with NPR.  He did not become a U.S. citizen until 2005, when his son was approximately 35 years old.

It is unknown if Eleanor Wilson also obtained Canadian citizenship, although columnist JB Williams has suggested that she did. If both Cruz’s parents were Canadian citizens at the time of their child’s birth in Canada, like Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger, Cruz could not be considered a natural born American citizen.

The Office of Vital Statistics of Alberta declined to release to The Post & Email Ted Cruz’s birth record, citing privacy laws.  Similarly, neither the U.S. State Department nor US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will release any documentation it may have on Cruz’s citizenship without his written consent.

The Post & Email has written to Cruz to ask that Cruz consent to release more documentation on his background.  In late April, we received confirmation that a certified letter raising the issues sent to Cruz’s campaign office was received.

Last month, The Post & Email received a copy of Cruz’s Selective Service registration which was reportedly effected through his application for a Pell Grant.  We have since written to the U.S. Department of Education for any documentation it may have on Cruz’s financial aid application(s).

Cruz reportedly renounced his Canadian citizenship last May.  The government of Canada asks on its renunciation application if the person so renouncing has or will shortly have citizenship in another country.

The Dallas Morning News raised the question of Cruz’s dual Canadian-US citizenship as it related to presidential eligibility but mentioned nothing of Obama’s claimed dual citizenship with the United States and Kenya, given that his claimed father, who was born in Kenya as a British citizen, became a citizen of the new country when it declared its independence from Great Britain in December 1963.

Beginning in 2009, Atty. Jack Maskell of the Congressional Research Service argued that both Sen. John McCain, who was born in Panama to two US-citizen parents, and Barack Hussein Obama, who was reportedly born in Hawaii to a US-citizen mother and his British-citizen father, were eligible to serve as president.

Many perceive Obama as un-American and disrespectful to America’s war dead on the solemn holiday of Memorial Day.  Obama has claimed Honolulu, HI; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Chicago, IL to be his “home town.”  In July, he plans to visit Kenya, which his wife has called his “home country.”

Since 2007, anyone publicly questioning Obama’s citizenship status, allegiance, or intent to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” has received ridicule, threats, spam email, surveillance, website breaches and other forms of harassment.

In 2012, a criminal investigation revealed that Obama’s only two forms of identification officially released from the federal government, a long-form birth certificate image posted on the White House website and a purported registration form from the Selective Service System, are “computer-generated forgeries.”

No law enforcement, prosecutorial, or congressional action has been taken on the revelations.