The logic escapes them...

[maddiemom]

13. Actually my late mother WAS a Canadian illegal alien.

Both her parents had been born in the U.S.A., but their families had been living (and were landowners) in Canada for some years when they met. My grandmother even taught school there for a while. They came back to the U.S. when Mom was a small child, in the early decades of the twentieth century when citizenship details seem to have not been treated much differently than if they'd moved within the States. Mom was nearly thirty, married with children, when she tried to cross the border for a day trip and admitted that she'd been born in Saskatchewan. As a result she had to come back (they let her in for the day) and had to go through the whole U.S. citizenship procedure. My grandparents had been going back and forth to visit relatives for years and it was never an issue for them, both having been born in the U.S.A.