Mitt Romney not a natural-born citizen?
Some point to his father’s birth in Mexico, grandparents citizenship
Amid ongoing challenges to Barack Obama’s presidential eligibility, some have raised questions about the constitutional status of the leading candidate for the Republican nomination
Mitt Romney not a natural-born citizen?
Some point to his father’s birth in Mexico, grandparents citizenship
Amid ongoing challenges to Barack Obama’s presidential eligibility, some have raised questions about the constitutional status of the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, Gov. Mitt Romney, contending he was born in Mexico or that his father was not an American citizen at the time of his birth.
George and Mitt Romney at the 1964 World’s Fair
However, the available evidence shows that even under the strictest interpretation of Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution, Romney is a natural-born citizen, according to Article 2, Section 1.
The questions have been raised because Romney’s grandparents went to Mexico in the 1800s, where Mitt Romney’s father, George W. Romney, was born, July 8, 1907.
According to a Romney family genealogy prepared by the London, England, LDS Temple, Romney’s grandparents – Gaskell Romney and Anna Amelia Pratt Romney – were polygamous Mormons who fled the United States when the Mormon church disavowed polygamy. As the genealogy points out, polygamy was a federal crime in the U.S., but it was allowed in Mexico.
The grandparents were even married in Mexico, although each of them was born to a U.S. citizen father in U.S. sovereign territory.
- Gaskell Romney was born Sept. 22, 1871, in St. George, Washington County, in the Utah Territory;
- Anna Amelia Pratt Romney was born May 6, 1876, in Salt Lake City, in the Utah Territory.
After the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910, the Mormon colonies began to be endangered, starting in 1911-1912 by raids from marauders. In response, Romney’s grandparents fled Mexico, taking their 5-year-old son, George W. Romney, with them. They settled first in Oakley, Idaho, and finally in Salt Lake City, Utah.
When George W. Romney ran for president in 1968, Charles Gordon, a counsel with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown Law Center, addressed the eligibility issue in an article in the Winter 1968 issue of the Maryland Law Review.
In the second paragraph of the article, titled “Who Can Be President of the United States: The Unresolved Enigma,” Gordon wrote:
“In the early stages of the 1968 presidential campaign this question became increasingly urgent, because Governor George Romney of Michigan was a leading contender for the Republican nomination. Governor Romney was born to American citizens in a Mormon colony in Chihuahua, Mexico, and came to the United States with his parents when he was five.”
After reviewing the history of the issue, Gordon concluded on the last page of his article that whether or not being born outside the United States disqualified George W. Romney from being president was never resolved during the 1968 presidential campaign:
“The withdrawal of Governor Romney has ended the possibility that clarification would emerge as a result of his candidacy.”
Gordon’s analysis is fairly typical of the treatment given in various law review articles of George W.