There is a claim that the term "natural born citizen" in the US Constitution refers only to people who were children of US citizens, and therefore anyone not born of a citizen--even if they gained their citizenship at birth--is ineligible for the office of the President. Although this argument has been applied to some individuals in the past, it seems to have gotten some attention again due to the claim it applies to Nikki Haley, which is why I'm choosing to make this post now. Much of the information here is actually things I discovered a few years ago when people were making this accusation of Kamala Harris, but given it has been brought up again, it seemed a good time to post the information to the blog. Granted, one can find this information elsewhere, but there seems no harm in adding one more post on it.
As not everyone wishes to read a lengthy post, the short answer is that Vattel never used the phrase natural born citizen at all in this section, nor any French phrase that obviously corresponds with it, and it first showed up in a British translation of his work about a decade after the Constitution was written. So anyone who tries to appeal to Vattel is appealing to something he never actually wrote and is showing themselves to not know what they are talking about. Now it's time for the long answer.
First, let's back up and discuss the basic issue. In Article II, Section 1 of the US Constitution, we see the following statement:
"No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."
This establishes that anyone who is not a natural born citizen is not eligible to be President (another section specifies these restrictions also apply to the Vice President). This requirement applies to no other office. But what is a natural born citizen?
The normal interpretation is that it simply refers to anyone who gained their United States citizenship at birth and is contrasted with those who gained their citizenship later in life. But an interpretation some have raised is that it refers only to those who gained their citizenship at birth and were the child of a citizen (the specifics of that vary--some claim only one parent being a citizen is required, some claim the father being a citizen is required, and some claim both must be citizens). An alternate argument arriving at the same conclusion is that contrary to the standard interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, people don't automatically become citizens just for being born in the United States. I've written previously about how that claim is wrong and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship to almost everyone born in the United States regardless of the citizenship of their parent (as well as regardless of whether their parent is legally authorized to be in the United States). However, with United States v. Wong Kim Ark as currently binding precedent that says people born in the United States--at least of parents that are permanent legal residents--some separate the two ideas and say that even if someone has birthright citizenship from being born in the US, it doesn't make them a natural born citizen, which they claim which requires birthright citizenship and to be the child of a citizen.
The main point of evidence raised for this is a quote from Emer de Vattel's work "The Law of Nations", which has the full title of "The Law of Nations: Or, Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns." This work was originally in French ("Le Droit des gens: ou, Principes de la loi naturelle, appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des Nations et des Souverains"), and in a translation, the following remark is found in Book 1, Chapter 19, Section 212:
"The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens."
If you're familiar with history and have looked carefully at the translation cited (or read my "short answer" a few paragraphs ago), you might have already noticed a major problem with this argument. The Constitution was written in 1787 and then ratified in 1789 or 1790 (it was ratified by enough states to be put into effect in 1789, but it wasn't until 1790 that every state agreed). Yet the translation in question is from 1797, years later; I cannot find any indication that this specific translation predated this year. And to top it all off, it wasn't even an American translation, but a British one.
There was a translation of The Law of Nations available in English prior to this one, but it renders this passage differently:
"The natives, or indigenes, are those born in the country of parents who are citizens."
The phrase "natural born citizens" is not found here, only "indigenes". Consulting multiple printings of translations prior to 1797, they all render it as the above. Translations printed in 1760, 1787, and 1793 all use the word "indigenes" (note that as these are older printings, sometimes the s looks like an f). This is the translation that Americans would have therefore been familiar with; and this even continues after the 1797 translation was published, as the Supreme Court case The Venus from 1814 shows. While not really relevant to the question of natural born citizens, the opinion says:
Vattel, who, though not very full to this point, is more explicit and more satisfactory on it than any other whose work has fallen into my hands, says
"The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its advantages. The natives or indigenes are those born in the country of parents who are citizens. Society not being able to subsist and to perpetuate itself but by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights."
The translation used above is taken from the earlier translation, not the 1797 one. The writers of the Constitution, and the general American public, could simply not have been aware of a usage of "natural born citizen" in a translation that hadn't existed yet and apparently was not well known in America for a while even afterwards.
At this point the reader is probably wondering what the original French said. Did it use the French version of "natural born citizen" or something similar? It says the following:
"Les Naturels, ou Indigènes sont ceux qui sont ceux qui sont nés dans le pays, de Parens Citoyens."
The word "Indigènes" is what was translated as "natural born citizen" in the later translation and "indigenes" in the earlier one. Examining dictionaries, one finds that it means native or indigenous person. This does not seem a match at all for natural born citizen, and it is hard to believe that the Constitution writers and ratifiers were trying in any way to invoke Vattel with such a phrase.
So the idea that the writers of the Constitution were invoking Vattel when they wrote "natural born citizen" falls flat. That wasn't how it was translated in English at the time, and even if they were looking at the French, "natural born citizen" isn't the association one would normally end up with for "Indigènes".
Someone could, I suppose, try to argue that the translator believed that natural born citizen meant being born in a country with a citizen father, and use that to advance the claim for that being the meaning of natural born citizen. The problem is, we have no idea who translated it (it is uncredited as far as I can tell) and thus no reason to believe they had any special insight into the subject. Even worse, that's not the argument people make about the Law of Nations and natural born citizen; virtually everyone I've seen who invokes The Law of Nations as evidence for this meaning never argues on the basis of the translator, but claims that Vattel was the one who used the term, or at least that the Constitution's framers were influenced by the English translation. As has been shown quite decisively, that claim is completely false.
Thus, Vattel's work is of little if any help in deciding the definition of natural born citizen; people should look elsewhere for what this term means. The point of this post was to correct the error regarding Vattel rather than offer a general argument on the meaning, but I would be remiss to not at least mention what seems a much more promising quote on the subject. Namely, one from Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, an extremely influential treatise on law that would have been familiar to any English speaking lawyer (in America or Britain) at the time. In Book 1, Chapter 10, he writes:
"The first and most obvious division of the people is into aliens and natural-born subjects. Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England, that is, within the ligeance, or as it is generally called, the allegiance of the king; and aliens, such as are born out of it."
So to him, a natural-born subject is born within the country, and those that are not are aliens. Later on in the same chapter he discusses cases where children born abroad are also natural born subjects in cases where their parents were in allegiance to the king, which would not of direct importance to this post is at least of tangential importance. However, following that discussion, he gives this quote:
"The children of aliens, born here in England, are, generally speaking, natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such. In which the constitution of France differs from ours; for there, by their jus albinatus, if a child be born of foreign parents, it is an alien."
Although in these quotes the term "subject" is used rather than "citizen," after the Revolutionary War people were obviously no longer subjects of the king, but rather citizens of the United States. This being the source and therefore definition for natural born citizen is highly plausible, particularly concerning there as far as I can tell was virtually no debate or questions on what the term meant when they were putting the Constitution together. Even if someone thinks this isn't the origin, it's certainly far more plausible than the idea that they somehow got the term "natural born citizen" out of Vattel despite the applicable translation not being published yet, and the translation that was published at the time used "indigenes".
So in conclusion, the idea that "natural born citizen" is restricted to children of citizens because Vattel supposedly said that was what the term means is simply ridiculous. Vattel never used that phrase, he used the French term "indigènes" which is not an obvious match for natural born citizen, and the English translation that rendered it as such wasn't even done until after the Constitution was written and ratified. If someone wants to instead appeal to an unknown British translator a decade later as evidence that this was the understanding of the term, that is certainly their right. But no one should claim that Emmer de Vattel used the phrase, because he didn't, and those who make such a claim end up looking silly in doing so.