Akron Law Review, Vol. 57 [2025], Iss. 1, Art. 2 50 AKRON LAW R EVIEW [57:49 I. INTRODUCTION Alecia Pennington was born to U.S. citizen parents in their Texas home. 2 The midwife who attended Alecia’s birth agreed not to report the birth to the local registrar, and her parents never registered her birth. 3 Alecia was never enrolled in a school outside of the family’s home, never went to the hospital or a doctor’s or dentist’s office, and she had neither bank nor immunization records. 4 Under U.S. law, a child born in the United States is automatically, in almost all circumstances, a U.S. citizen, because citizens include everyone “born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” 5 Birth registration would not have constituted Alecia’s claim to U.S. citizenship, and the Fourteenth Amendment does not limit citizenship to individuals with a birth certificate. 6 But without the birth certificate, neither the Texas nor the U.S. government recognized her as a citizen, and Alecia could not access the rights of her U.S. citizenship or establish her legal identity.7 Without a contemporaneously registered birth, Alecia sought to register 2. RadioLab: The Girl Who Doesn’t Exist, WNYC Studios (Aug. 29, 2016), https://radiolab.org/episodes/invisible-girl [https://perma.cc/TMY2-YHNL](downloaded using Spotify). 3. Id. (quoting Alecia to say, “my dad kind of adopted some of those ideas, that the government should not have a number assigned to us.”). 4. Id. 5. Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1401 (1994); see also United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898). The only exception to birthright citizenship for individuals born in the United States is children born in the United States to foreign diplomats; those children are not considered to be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and they receive lawful permanent residence rather than U.S. citizenship at birth. 8 C.F.R. § 101.3(a)(1) (1982). This exception did not apply to Alecia—her birth in Texas entitled her to U.S. citizenship. Birth to U.S. citizen parents also generally entitles a person to U.S. citizenship, but when born outside the United States, the birth registered with the country in which the child is born, and U.S. citizenship is verified by filing the Consular Report of Birth Abroad. 22 C.F.R. § 50.7 (2018). 6. This Article generally refers to U.S. citizenship rather than U.S. nationality. The terms citizenship and nationality are often used interchangeably, but there are two distinctions. First, in international law, nationality refers to the legal bond between a person and a state that entitles a state to assert the person’s rights in the international plane vis-à-vis other states. Citizenship refers to the legal bond between the person and the state that operates in the domestic sphere. Thus, nationality entitles a person to rights like diplomatic protection, while citizenship entitles a person like voting rights or access to social benefits. P AUL WEIS, NATIONALITY AND S TATELESSNESS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW , 4–5 (1979). Second, in U.S. immigration and nationality law, individuals born in the United States and some of its territories are U.S. citizens. Individuals born in American Samoa are non-citizen nationals of the United States, a status which entitles them to travel to the United States without visas but not vote. Fitisemanu v. United States, 1 F.4th 862, 865 (10th Cir. 2021), cert. denied, 143 S. Ct. 362 (2022) (noting that “American Samoans are denied the right to vote, the right to run for elective federal or state office outside American Samoa, and the right to serve on federal and state juries. They are, however, entitled to work and travel freely in the United States and receive certain advantages in the naturalization process.”). 7. RadioLab, supra note 2. https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/akronlawreview/vol57/iss1/2 2