Ever since he first announced his candidacy for President of the United States, Senator Ted Cruz has been in the middle of controversy surrounding his ability to even run in the first place.
Since Cruz was born in Canada, there has been a hot debate of “natural-born” citizenship and how it applies.
Rafael Edward Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada in 1970, to a Cuban father and an American-born mother. Though the citizenship of his mother should guarantee American citizenship for Cruz, the concept of “natural-born citizen” is still up for discussion.
The Constitution doesn’t make things abundantly clear, either. The three main qualifications are that the candidate must be 35 years of age or older, they must have lived in the US for 14 years, and that they must be a “natural-born citizen.”
Cruz fits the first two qualifications (his family moved to the US when he was four). As for the third and final qualification, most people agree that Cruz fits the bill for that as well.
Though the “natural-born citizen” term was defined in the Constitution originally as only people born on American soil, the Naturalization Act of 1790 stated that children born internationally to a US citizen parent were citizens themselves.
The question of whether or not Ted Cruz is a natural-born citizen has been hotly debated since he declared that he was running for president.
To me, it seems perfectly reasonable for Cruz to run. He was born in Canada, sure, but the Naturalization Act explicitly states that he’s a citizen.
The situation has surfaced before—Barack Obama’s father was African, and John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Neither of those men were disallowed to run.
So, even though he was not born in the fifty states, Ted Cruz is still very eligible to run for the office of President.