Fourteenth-Amendment
The movement claim that a parallel narrower citizenship category exists alongside 14A citizenship — one that ordinary Americans could occupy while declining to be 'citizens of the United States' for IRC purposes — is foreclosed
Alternate-citizenship theory leverages a real piece of constitutional history — that pre-1868 the Constitution did not define federal citizenship, and that the 14th Amendment supplied the definition as part of the Reconstruction package — to argue for a separate, narrower 'state citizen' status one could occupy while not being a 14A citizen. The constructionist seed has primary-source support: Slaughter-House Cases (1873) treated the dual federal/state structure as deliberate and described the 14A as having 'establish[ed] a clear and comprehensive definition of citizenship' not previously found in the Constitution. The seed is real. The operative move it is used to support is foreclosed: Afroyim v. Rusk (1967) treats 14A citizenship as the unitary federal-citizen status surrenderable only through voluntary renunciation, and federal courts uniformly construe 26 U.S.C. § 7701(b)(1)(B)'s 'citizen of the United States' in the ordinary 14A/INA sense. The doctrinal door is closed.
Citizenship and Naturalization: The Constitutional Structure
U.S. citizenship before the Fourteenth Amendment was a contested category — the Constitution did not define it, Congress had not defined it by statute, and *Dred Scott* had held that some people born on U.S. soil could not be citizens. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, supplied the definition: '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.' That single sentence created the dual federal/state structure modern citizenship operates under. The Slaughter-House Cases (1873) treated the structure as deliberate. 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(23) defines 'naturalization' broadly — 'the conferring of nationality of a state upon a person after birth, by any means whatsoever' — language that has carried doctrinal weight in some directions and not in others. This concept page lays out the structure; the operative-status question for federal-statute purposes is treated in a paired finding.