Just to run this up the flagpole….
Right now a diary near the top of the Rec List raises questions about Ted Cruz’s citizenship, based in part on two allegations of fact:
According to Ted Cruz's father's statement, Ted Cruz's parents applied for and received Canadian citizenship before his birth in Alberta. Thus his mother committed the act of obtaining naturalization of a foreign state, a potentially expatriating act.
In addition, until 1977, Canada required those seeking Canadian citizenship to swear an oath renouncing their allegiance to their previous country. This action, combined with behavior showing the person intended to relinquish his or her U.S. citizenship, has been ruled an expatriating act by U.S. courts. If Ted Cruz's mother obtained Canadian citizenship before 1977, then she swore this oath before a Canadian government official.
Neither of these allegations is supported in the diary. I haven’t found support for either one. (I’ve looked harder for the first one.) [See update.]
The first, at least, appears unlikely to be true. According to (yes) Wikipedia, under the Canadian Citizenship Act in effect at the time, one could become a Canadian citizen through “naturalization in Canada after five years' residence as a landed immigrant.” As far as I know, everybody agrees that Rafael Cruz met and married Ted’s mother Eleanor in the U.S. in 1969, and that Ted was born in December 1970. To my knowledge, nobody has explained how Eleanor could possibly have done what the diary claims.
[Oh, wait: although McClatchy and others say that the marriage was in 1969, there is evidence that Rafael and Eleanor moved to Canada maybe in 1967. (HuffPo published a document that puts Rafael in New Orleans in July of that year.) That pretty much fits with Rafael Cruz’s statement to NPR: "I worked in Canada for eight years. And while I was in Canada, I became a Canadian citizen." There would have been time for him to do that after Ted was born.]
Ted Cruz will have a Birther problem if Birthers decide he has a problem — law and facts be damned — and we can enjoy it as much as we like. And I’m not posing as an expert on the law, and certainly not on Ted Cruz. But the notion that Cruz’s mother renounced U.S. citizenship before he was born doesn’t seem to pan out.
Friday, Jan 8, 2016 · 9:05:23 PM +00:00 · HudsonValleyMark
Johnny Wurster, in comments, links to a court case that supports the other diary’s second claim — that the Cruzes would have had to renounce allegiance to the United States in order to become Canadian citizens — but also provides additional evidence that they would have had to live in Canada for five years first.