Messages like the one quoted below have been floating around trying to claim Barak Obama is ineligible to be elected President because there are questions about his status as a "natural-born citizen" of the US.

It seems that Barack Obama is not qualified to be president after all for the following reason:

Barack Obama is not legally a U.S. natural-born citizen according to the law on the books at the time of his birth, which falls between "December 24, 1952 to November 13, 1986." Presidential office requires a natural-born citizen if the child was not born to two U.S. citizen parents, which of course is what exempts John McCain though he was born in the Panama Canal. US Law very clearly stipulates: "If only one parent was a U.S. citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least five of which had to be after the age of 16." Barack Obama's father was not a U.S. citizen and Obama's mother was only 18 when Obama was born, which means though she had been a U.S. citizen for 10 years, (or citizen perhaps because of Hawaii being a territory) the mother fails the test for being so for at least 5 years **prior to** Barack Obama's birth, but *after* age 16. It doesn't matter *after* . In essence, she was not old enough to qualify her son for automatic U.S. citizenship. At most, there were only 2 years elapsed since his mother turned 16 at the time of Barack Obama's birth when she was 18 in Hawaii. His mother would have needed to have been 16+5= 21 years old, at the time of Barack Obama's birth for him to have been a natural-born citizen. As aforementioned, she was a young college student at the time and was not. Barack Obama was already 3 years old at that time his mother would have needed to have waited to have him as the only U.S. Citizen parent. Obama instead should have been naturalized, but even then, that would still disqualify him from holding the office.

*** Naturalized citizens are ineligible to hold the office of President.

*** Though Barack Obama was sent back to Hawaii at age 10, all the other info does not matter because his mother is the one who needed to have been a U.S. citizen for 10 years prior to his birth on August 4, 1961, with 5 of those years being after age 16. Further, Obama may have had to have remained in the country for some time to protect any citizenship he would have had, rather than living in Indonesia. Now you can see why Obama's aides stopped his speech about how we technically have more than 50 states, because it would have led to this discovery. This is very clear cut and a blaring violation of U.S. election law. I think the Gov. of California would be very interested in knowing this if Obama were elected President without being a natural-born U.S. citizen, and it would set precedence. Stay tuned to your TV sets because I suspect some of this information will be leaking through over the next several days.

Thomas Sowell
Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow
The Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305

Snopes, one of the BEST sites on the web for finding out if something you've seen floating around the Internet is true or not, has a very interesting article looking at the questions raised in the quote above. In addition to what I've quoted below, Snopes also gives some interesting information on why it can sometimes be confusing to determine if someone is considered a natural-born citizen or not - though in this case, the question is basically pointless, since anyone born in the US - regardless of their parents citizenship status, ages or how long they've been in the US - IS a natural born citizen.

The item quoted above posits that Barack Obama does not qualify as a natural-born citizen of the U.S. because the law in effect at the time he was born specified that "If only one parent was a U.S. citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least five of which had to be after the age of 16." Since Barack Obama only had one U.S. citizen parent (his mother), and his mother had not been residing in the U.S. for at least five years after the age of 16 when Barack was born (because she herself was only 18 at the time), then he's not a natural-born citizen.

A few facets of this claim immediately jump out as being far-fetched: first, that a sitting U.S. Senator who has already spent a good deal of time and money securing his party's nomination for the presidency would suddenly be discovered as ineligible due to an obscure provision of U.S. law; and second, that U.S. law would essentially penalize someone who would otherwise qualify for natural-born citizenship status simply because his mother was too young. The fact is, the qualifications listed in the example quoted above are moot because they refer to someone who was born outside the United States. Since Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, they do not apply to him.

Moreover, because Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, all other citizenship qualifications are moot. The Fourteenth Amendment states that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." Since Hawaii is part of the United States, even if Barack Obama's parents were both non-U.S. citizens who hadn't even set foot in the country until just before he was born, he'd still qualify as a natural-born citizen.

Some have claimed that Barack Obama's Hawaiian birthplace doesn't qualify him as a natural-born citizen because Hawaii was not yet a state when he was born. This claim is wrong on two counts: Hawaii was admitted as the 50th state almost two years before Barack Obama was born there (21 August 1959 for statehood vs. 4 August 1961 for Obama's birthdate); and even before it achieved statehood status Hawaii was a U.S. territory, so persons born there were entitled to claim the status of natural-born U.S. citizens.

Barack Obama would not be the first person to qualify for the office of President of the United States by virtue of having been born in a U.S. territory. Senator Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential candidate, was born in Phoenix, Arizona, three years before that territory was admitted to the U.S. as a state.

I have to say, I find it a bit galling that conservatives are even raising this as a question since they've often pointed out that the US policy of giving anyone born on US soil instant US citizenship leads many women from Mexico to try and sneak across the border so that they can give birth to their babies in the US so that their children will be citizens. One of the most common complaints I've heard is that because these children are US citizens, the state has certain obligations to them, and because the state is hesitant to take kids away from their parents over citizenship issues (and they can't deport the children,) the illegal-immigrant parents end up benefiting as well. So, it's pretty obvious that conservatives are WELL aware of the fact that anyone born in the US itself is, without question, a US citizen, and yet they decide to try and blow this bunch of chaff in the air in hopes that Obama will have to waste time trying to defend his citizenship (and, by extention, I have a feeling, his patriotism, which - of course - conservatives love to question.) It's nothing more than a typical dirty trick.