Citizenship
Although the Panama Canal Zone was legally an unincorporated US territory until the implementation of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties in 1979, questions arose almost from its inception as to whether the Zone was considered part of the United States for constitutional purposes, or, in the phrase of the day, whether the Constitution followed the flag. In 1901 the US Supreme Court had ruled in Downes v. Bidwell that unincorporated territories are not the United States. On July 28, 1904, Controller of the Treasury Robert Tracewell stated, "While the general spirit and purpose of the Constitution is applicable to the zone, that domain is not a part of the United States within the full meaning of the Constitution and laws of the country." Accordingly, the Supreme Court held in 1905 in Rasmussen v. United States that the full Constitution only applies for incorporated territories of the United States. Until the rulings in these so-called Insular Cases, children born of two US citizens in the Canal Zone had been subject to the Naturalization Act of 1795, which granted them statutory US citizenship at birth. With the ruling of 1905, persons born in the Canal Zone became US nationals, not full citizens. This no man's land with regard to US citizenship was perpetuated until Congress passed legislation in 1937 that corrected this deficiency. The law is now codified under title 8, section 1403. It not only grants statutory and declaratory born citizenship to those born in the Canal Zone after February 26, 1904, of at least one US citizen parent, but also does so retroactively for all children born of at least one US citizen in the Canal Zone before the law's enactment.
In 2008, during a minor controversy over whether Canal Zoneāborn John McCain -- born in the Zone in 1936 -- was legally eligible for the presidency, the US Senate resolved that McCain was a "natural born Citizen" of the United States.
Read more about this topic: Panama Canal Zone
Famous quotes containing the word citizenship:
“To see self-sufficiency as the hallmark of maturity conveys a view of adult life that is at odds with the human condition, a view that cannot sustain the kinds of long-term commitments and involvements with other people that are necessary for raising and educating a child or for citizenship in a democratic society.”
—Carol Gilligan (20th century)
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—Thomas Paine (17371809)
“I would wish that the women of our country could embrace ... [the responsibilities] of citizenship as peculiarly their own. If they could apply their higher sense of service and responsibility, their freshness of enthusiasm, their capacity for organization to this problem, it would become, as it should become, an issue of profound patriotism. The whole plane of political life would be lifted.”
—Herbert Hoover (18741964)