>natural citizen of the United States
The Fourteenth Amendment as drafted by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction in the spring of 1866 did not explicitly deal with citizenship. The Senate added what is now the first sentence, which grants both national and state citizenship in language quite similar to that of the Civil Rights statute, and the House agreed to the amendment. The basic principle of a federal rule of race-blind citizenship based on birth (and naturalization) was not in much dispute, although there was some debate about the restriction of the grant of citizenship to persons subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
The Citizenship Clause has given rise to several controversies. Does the grant of citizenship bring with it any particular legal benefits, and if so what are they? Are these benefits, whatever they might be, to be defined and enforced exclusively by courts? Alternatively, does Congress have power to broadly supplement judicially-recognized benefits, thanks to the final sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment, which empowers Congress to “enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of” the Amendment? If there is such a congressional power, does it encompass authority to define rights of citizenship applicable against other private persons? And how should the first sentence’s restriction to persons “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States be understood? When adopted, that clause, which was drafted against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Act, was clearly understood to withhold birthright citizenship from the American-born children of foreign diplomats present in this country, because under international law diplomats and their families were largely immune from the legal control and the courts of their host country. The limiting clause also was understood not to grant birthright citizenship to various members of Indian tribes whose political relations with the United States limited its authority over the tribes’ members. The scope of the limiting clause is a matter of political controversy today.