Haley has never demonstrated proof that her parents were lawful residents at the time she was born
Is Nikki Haley an anchor baby?
As A Threshold Matter, Nikki Haley, The Daughter Of Two Non-Citizens, Must Provide Proof That Her Parents Were Lawful Residents When She Was Born
As we head into the New Hampshire Republican primary, the presidential field has consolidated around three major candidates: Donald Trump, the frontrunner by wide margins, Nikki Haley, and Ron DeSantis. With Vivek Ramaswamy’s distant fourth place finish in Iowa and subsequent endorsement of the 45th President, Trump’s edge in New Hampshire looks insurmountable.
Recent polling suggests that he commands an outright majority of all New Hampshire GOP voters, meaning that even if all the remaining candidates dropped out and rallied around a single challenger to Trump, their collective effort would still fail – without, perhaps, outside help from Democrats and Independents. With recent reports that Ron DeSantis’ War Room has been dissolved, and all the staff being laid off in the aftermath of Iowa’s disaster, it seems to have proven true Nikki Haley’s post-Iowa declaration that the Republican Primary has now become “a two person race.”
That is, unless the Constitution has any say.
If the only two remaining viable candidates are, in fact, Trump and Haley, it should actually just be a one-person race. That is because of the two, Donald Trump is the only candidate still running who qualifies as a natural-born citizen under the Constitution’s Eligibility Clause in Article II, Section 1. Unlike Nikki Haley, President Trump’s two parents were both citizens at the time he was born on American soil, in Queens, New York, in 1946. His father was a citizen by birthright, his mother was naturalized – and completed the naturalization process years before Trump’s birth. Therefore, he meets the Constitutional standard for eligibility.
Nikki Haley, on the other hand, is a much different story. Nikki Haley was born “Nimarata Randhawa” in Bamberg, South Carolina, in 1972. But at the time of her birth, neither one of her parents were American citizens. As recently unearthed by investigative journalist Laura Loomer, both “Haley’s parents were Indian immigrants who did not become U.S. citizens until after her birth in 1972. Her father, Ajit Randhawa, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1978, Haley’s office said. Her mother, Raj Randhawa, became a U.S. citizen in 2003, a year before Haley won a seat in the S.C. House.”
Loomer’s report further states her inability to confirm whether Haley’s parents actually ever went through the naturalization process to receive citizenship. This, on its own, is quite worrying. But even if one or both of Haley’s parents ultimately did become naturalized citizens subsequent to Haley’s birth, Haley has never demonstrated proof that her parents were lawful residents at the time she was born.
Critically, nobody seems to have answers as to whether Ajit and Raj Randhawa were lawfully permitted to reside in the United States at the time of Haley’s birth at all! Even if they were, what was the status of their lawful residence? Were they here on student visas? Some kind of employment visa? Whatever might have been the 1972-equivalent of an H-1B, something else? Nobody has answers to these critical questions.
Unless proven otherwise, one cannot be at fault for asking – based on the alarmingly scant information available on a leading presidential candidate – whether Haley’s parents were unlawfully residing as illegal aliens? This would make Nikki Haley a so-called “anchor baby,” flouting the letter and spirit of the Constitution in the most obnoxious way possible.
The onus of proof of citizenship must be placed squarely on Haley’s campaign. If the question ever gets litigated, any objective court should make a determination of the lawfulness of Haley’s parent’s residency status based on the laws of 1972, and not attempt to make equivocations between the generally understood meaning of citizenship some fifty years ago, and its commonly understood meaning today: one that recklessly (and suicidally) confers citizenship upon anyone who makes it to these shores, including the anchor babies of illegal aliens.
The Biden regime’s interpretation of citizenship would have been abhorrent to the framers of the Constitution, all our Founding Fathers, and nearly every generation in American history up until five minutes ago, who toiled long and hard for the privileges and immunities of citizenship. Simply because that longstanding precedent is ignored and mocked with impunity today does not make it right, nor does it abnegate the urgency to enforce our laws. In fact, the opposite is true: we should be enforcing our laws more vigilantly than ever, given the direness of the situation.
Article II, Section 1 Of The Constitution Requires That In Order To Meet The High Constitutional Threshold For Eligibility, The Qualifier’s Parents Must Have Both Been Citizens At The Time Of His Or Her Birth
American citizenship is a privilege, not a right. This was so long and well understood by our Founding Fathers that it became simple common sense, not something they contemplated would ever need to be spelled out in painstaking detail.
All that said, however, the relevant question is one of Presidential Eligibility, not birthright citizenship – and that term’s constitutional relationship to “natural-born” citizenship. In short, citizenship and the question of birthright, although an important issue on its own, especially today with our unprecedented illegal alien crisis, is an entirely separate question from Presidential Eligibility, which is the rightful domain of Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution, not the Fourteenth Amendment.
Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment states as follows: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Several points must be underscored: First, this amendment deals with the basic privileges and immunities of American citizenship – and, specifically, the citizenship status of the approximately four million slaves freed because of the Union’s victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War. The architects of this amendment were patently not contemplating Presidential Eligibility, the domain of Article II, and, notably, the only such article in the entire Constitution where the term “natural-born citizenship” arises.
Those who otherwise like to conflate the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment with questions of Presidential Eligibility cite the landmark Supreme Court decision, United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). There, the Supreme Court decided that the child of two lawfully residing Chinese immigrants should be conferred all the privileges and immunities of citizenship on the basis of birthright.
Importantly, the defendant of that case was not a leading presidential candidate seeking the highest office of the land, but a mere day laborer seeking re-entry into the United States after being denied under the Chinese Exclusion Act following a trip abroad. After a comprehensive scrutiny of the facts and history, the Court, rightly or wrongly, determined that Wong Kim Ark should be conferred with the privileges and immunities of citizenship because, critically, Wong Kim Ark’s parents were lawful residents.
To support this theory, the Court referenced Yick Wo v. Hopkins, a case from 1886 which determined that lawfully residing Chinese persons, despite “remaining subjects of the emperor of China,” could receive the protection of American laws – a fundamental distinction, by the way, from the full privileges and immunities of citizenship – so long as those persons “are permitted by the United States to reside here” – in other words, legal residents.
By analogy, the Court found that Wong Kim Ark, born of lawfully residing parents, could thus be conferred with the basic privileges and immunities of citizenship. The holding of Wong Kim Ark is significant, for our purposes, on multiple counts: one, implicit in its reasoning, though not explicit, is the grafting of the phrase “natural-born citizen” upon the Fourteenth Amendment.
While it may be true that the Fourteenth Amendment vaguely outlined the contours of this phrase, nowhere is it stated explicitly, for one; and to the extent those contours are vaguely outlined, nowhere does that one-to-one imputation necessarily establish that the same qualifications for citizenship, as a consequence of Wong Kim Ark, would be exhaustive of the requirements stated in the Presidential Eligibility clause.
The persons contemplated by the Fourteenth Amendment were so obviously former slaves, the person contemplated by Wong Kim Ark was a Chinese day laborer. Critically, in neither instance was the President of the United States a party to the case, or the fundamentally distinct issue of Presidential Eligibility implicated at all, let alone of front and center concern.
For that all-critical question, we look elsewhere. In the 1874 decision, Minor v. Happersett, clarity on the determination of Presidential Eligibility, and what the phrase natural-born citizenship means as applied to that issue, is underlined.
There, a unanimous Supreme Court stated: “The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also.
These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first.”
So, the Court held that “doubts” existed as to the citizenship status of children born to non-citizen parents, doubts that lingered, and were not dispelled, contrary to popular belief, in Wong Kim Ark. The Happersett decision also followed the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment by eight years, so the idea – as some modern scholars who contest my analysis claim – that the Amendment somehow put a rest to the ambiguity of the meaning of natural-born citizenship, no less as that question applies to Presidential Eligibility, is false.
If anything, these two decisions only reinforce the view that the question of natural-born citizenship on its merits remains undecided, and second, the issue of Presidential Eligibility, as an entirely separate Constitutional consideration, derives its principal meaning from sources other than the Fourteenth Amendment.
The distinction between the favored construction of the Fourteenth Amendment by the legal establishment that finds in it grounds for natural-born citizenship, despite, critically, the Amendment’s notable omission of that phrase, and the entirely separate issue of Presidential Eligibility, is one noted by many well-reputed legal scholars, both past and present.
For instance, Michael D. Ramsey, who is a Law Professor at the University of San Diego and former law clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, wrote in a University of Pennsylvania Law Review article published in 2017 that “…as to persons born in the United States, the Fourteenth Amendment appears categorically to declare them citizens at birth.
The question, germane only to the [Presidential] Eligibility Clause, is whether persons in these categories are “natural born” citizens (as opposed to citizens by positive law), and the strong implication of a reading based on [Emmerich de] Vattel is that they are not.” [Emphasis mine.]
“Vattel” here refers to Emmerich de Vattel, who wrote a leading treatise on international law and citizenship, The Law of Nations (1758), widely known and read by our Founding Fathers at the time the Constitution was adopted some thirty years later. Vattel’s profoundly influential masterwork included the language “natural-born citizenship,” which is how the Founding Fathers learned of the famous phrase that ultimately made its way into their handiwork. Because our Constitution does not define the phrase, resort must be made to Vattel’s own work, which is very clear about its meaning: “…natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.”
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Nikki Haley Wants to House 1 Million Palestinian Refugees in USA
Nikki Haley was sympathetic to plans to house up to 1 million Palestinian refugees in the US, as well as others from Middle Eastern “terrorist” states, during a CNN interview she made in October. Now, as the New Hampshire Presidential Primary approaches, Haley has hardened her stance and is calling for “pro-Hamas countries” like Egypt and Qatar to house the Palestinians displaced by Israel’s invasion of Gaza, which Haley enthusiastically supports.
During a CNN interview with Jake Tapper, Nikki Haley called not just for bringing Palestinian refugees into the United States, but Iranian refugees as well, who haven’t been displaced yet, but presumably will be if Nikki Haley’s foreign policy ever hits the Middle East.
Residents of these countries, Haley said, “have terrorists overseeing them,” but don’t want to, and it should be no problem for the US to “separate civilians from the terrorists.”
It’s “what we have to do,” said Nikki Haley.
“You have to realize that whether we’re talking about Gazans and Palestinians, half of them at the time that I was there didn’t want to be under Hamas’s rule. They didn’t want to have terrorists overseeing them. They knew that they were living a terrible life because of Hamas,” Haley told Tapper in the CNN interview.
“You have the other half that supported Hamas and wanted to be a part of that.”
“We see that with Iran too. The Iranian people don’t want to be under that Iranian regime.”
“There are so many of these people who want to be free from this terrorist rule. They want to be free from all of that. And America’s always been sympathetic to the fact that you can separate civilians from terrorists. And that’s what we have to do.”
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