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 hen
President Bush visits Ellis Island tomorrow morning, he's sure to
pepper his remarks with all those happy platitudes about America
being "a nation of immigrants" and so on. You won't hear
much discussion of the speech afterwards because its contents probably
won't warrant it.
But Bush could,
if he chooses, use Ellis Island as the perfect venue to make a suggestion
that would draw enormous attention, help him politically, and be
a worthwhile goal for American law. He could propose amending the
Constitution to permit foreign-born citizens to serve as president.
The Constitution,
of course, is explicit on this point in Article II, Section 1: "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." No shadows and penumbras
there; immigrants are banned from the presidency. This, in fact,
is the single legal distinction made between Americans who are citizens
at birth and those who gain citizenship through naturalization.
In every other respect, they are the same.
One of the
wonders of American culture, of course, is the spectacle of people
becoming American. We call this assimilation or, less clinically,
Americanization. It is a rough process that on an individual level
includes successes, failures, and much in between. It also holds
a special place in the public imagination — most Americans can name
an immigrant forebear, and a great many know immigrant ancestors
as more than names. That's why politicians enjoy putting places
like Ellis Island on their itineraries. That's also why Ellis Island
is the perfect place to announce an effort to end the ban on immigrant
presidents.
Before anybody
attempts to amend the Constitution, of course, it's important to
understand why it says what it does right now. Unfortunately, the
prohibition against immigrant presidents was not much debated by
the founders, partly because it was a late addition to the Constitution.
Yet it is not difficult to guess their reasoning. They probably
recognized that many European kings weren't born in the lands they
ruled, and wanted to make the presidency a distinct office. They
also may have believed that the country's chief elected official
needed to possess an inborn sense of American culture. At a time
when a newly independent United States was struggling to find its
place in the world, this is understandable — though it's also worth
noting that the drafters included a loophole that would have permitted
foreign-born people living at that time (e.g., Alexander Hamilton)
to become president. So the notion was not entirely off-limits to
them.
Today, it is
hard to imagine American voters electing a king or queen to the
White House. It is also hard to imagine them elevating a foreign-born
candidate who wasn't essentially American. An immigrant president
most likely would embrace America with the zeal of a convert. He
would be a flag-waving patriot whose love of country exceeds that
of most native-born Americans. He would also probably have been
raised in the United States since early childhood. (At the very
least, the president would not be fresh off the boat: The Constitution
requires any president, even a native, to have lived in the United
States for 14 years.)
The political
case for the amendment is obvious: If the GOP wants to expand its
reach among Hispanics and Asian Americans, this amendment beats
capitulating on Vieques. Imagine Bush mentioning the amendment everywhere
he goes; suddenly it becomes the Bush Amendment. And it operates
with great symbolic power, as a kind of minor successor to the 15th
Amendment (giving blacks the vote) and the 19th Amendment (women's
suffrage). It becomes a tool of inclusion, more useful than 1,000
political conventions like the one in Philadelphia. Bush wins even
if the amendment — like most proposed amendments — doesn't get enacted.
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