| Opening the Gates |
5 April 2004
|
Foreign Born Citizens Need Equal Presidential Rights
This is not a plea to make the Terminator the 44th president, but rather an acknowledgement that the founding fathers plain screwed up when they wrote the requirement that only native born citizens could be president. In a country of immigrants and their descendents, it is ridiculous to deny equal rights to citizens on the grounds that they weren't born in the US. By most measures, they would make better presidents than the locals.
With specific reference to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, there has been discussion of changing Clause 5 in Article 2 of the US constitution that reads "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States." In general, this entire clause needs to be dropped.
The age requirement has proved irrelevant. No president has ever been younger than 40. The electorate seems to have decided that young whipper-snappers in their 30s just aren't ready. And yet, if by some astonishing twist of events a person in their 20s is qualified to lead the nation in every other respect, an American version of Pitt the Younger, then let the kid sit in the Oval Office.
The 14-year residency requirement is out of date and needs to go. The first few presidents had been born British, and so the 14-year period ensured that some kind of tie to the US existed over and above citizenship as of the adoption of the Constitution. It's hard to imagine a person who hasn't resided in the US for 14 years making a serious case for the presidency, though. Fundraising alone makes it necessary to live in the US, let alone building a political base.
And so there is the question of the foreign born, that is of citizens who are Americans as a result of a conscious act rather than by accident of birth. They are people of more than average ambition; immigrants are the ones with the get up and go as proved by the fact that they got up and went to a new country. They are the ones who paid for the civics classes at night to pass the citizenship test. They might not be able to pronounce some of the words in the oath of office as a native born citizen might, but President Kennedy couldn't help saying "Americ-er" either.
As for the concern that America's enemies might plant a mole deep in American society and get a traitor elected to the White House, it is hard to see such a person surviving the media and opposition investigations without being discovered. Moreover, a cursory look at the great traitors in American history from Benedict Arnold to Aldrich Ames shows one simple thing -- they were born in America.
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