Qualifications for President and the “Natural Born” Citizenship Eligibility Requirement
eligibility rule.”[1] Amar also agrees that the framers’ aversion to hereditary monarchies appeared to play an additional role in erecting a barrier to immigrants being President within the Constitution—a document that was otherwise, for its time, enlightened as permitting immigrants to weave their way into the fabric of American political and social life:
These anxieties had been fed by England’s 1701 Act, which inclined early Americans to associate the very idea of a foreign-born head of state with the larger issue of monarchial government. Though England banned foreigners from all other posts, it imposed no natural-born requirement on the head of state himself. In fact, the 1701 Act explicitly contemplated foreign born future monarchs—the German House of Hanover, in particular. By 1787 this continental royal family had produced three English kings named George, only the third of whom had been born in England itself. Article II’s natural-born language squarely rejected the 1701 idea of future foreign-born heads of state, in no small part because many republicans had come to link the idea (perhaps more sociologically than logically) with hereditary succession and foreign intrigue. Foreign-born princes might be good enough to rule in the Old World but should be kept out of the New World order—or at least the New World presidency.[2]
The apparent purposes of this citizenship clause were thus to assure the requisite fealty and allegiance to the nation from the person to be the chief executive of the United States, and to prevent wealthy foreign citizens, and particularly wealthy foreign royalty and their relatives, from coming to the United States, becoming naturalized citizens, and then scheming and buying their way into the Presidency or creating an American monarchy. The possibility of satisfying these purposes would appear to be as likely from an interpretation of the term “natural born” citizen which would include one who is a citizen “at birth” by either common law principles of jus soli, that is, being born on the soil (in the general usage of the term, one who is “native born”), or by the operation of statutory law of the principles of jus sanguinis, that is, through the law of descent by being born to U.S. citizens abroad. That is, one who is a citizen of the United States “at birth” by descent under federal law could develop the requisite allegiances and reverences for the United States passed down, inculcated, and taught by one’s parent-citizens, and would have a lifetime of allegiance to the United States at least as strong, in a theoretical sense, as one of a “native born” citizen.[3] Native born citizens, that is, those born “in” the country, who are subject to its jurisdiction, regardless of the nationality or citizenship of their parents, have always under British common law, as well as under the laws of the original states, and then the United States since its founding, been considered to have the “natural” allegiance and ties to the nation.[4]
- ↑ Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution, A Biography, at 164 (Random House 2005).
- ↑ Id. at 165.
- ↑ See Tuan Anh Nguyen v. INS, 533 U.S. 53, 64–65 (2001): Citizenship statutes requiring certain relationships of children born abroad to U.S. citizen parent or parents are adopted “… to ensure that the child and the citizen parent have some demonstrated opportunity or potential to develop not just a relationship that is recognized, as a formal matter, by the law, but one that consists of the real, everyday ties that provide a connection between child and citizen parent and, in turn, the United States.” See also Miller v. United States, 523 U.S. 420, 438–440 (1998) noting the interest of “fostering ties with this country….”
- ↑ See Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870, at 287 (UNC Press 1978): “No one appeared to re-examine and justify Coke’s idea of the ‘natural-born citizen.’ Americans merely continued to assume that ‘birth within the allegiance’ conferred the status and its accompanied rights. Natives were presumably educated from infancy in the values and habits necessary for self-government, and there was no need to worry about their qualifications for membership.” See also discussion in Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Volume I, “Of the Rights of Persons,” 354, 357–358 (1765).
