However, Michelle Obama did not, as claimed in the example quoted above, state that the Founding Fathers were not “born in America,” nor did she express ignorance of the fact that many of the Founding Fathers started their lives in the thirteen British North American colonies that later formed the original United States of America.
The First Lady said, in reference to the Founding Fathers, that “none of them were born American; they became American,” and in the original context (i.e., a naturalization ceremony), the meaning of that statement was perfectly clear.
What Michelle Obama was communicating on that occasion was a distinction between geography and nationality: she did not say that the Founding Fathers were born somewhere other than America, but rather that they did not start out their lives in a fully formed and established nation known as “America” complete with its own history, customs, culture, and values, as modern American children are. Rather, our forefathers were born into a very different world as British subjects in a colonial empire, and they chose to seek new opportunities and lives for themselves by transforming their world into something distinctive (through the establishment of a new nation known as the United States of America), just as modern immigrants born outside America choose to transform their worlds by opting to leave their homelands for America and seek new lives through becoming U.S. citizens.