The Natural Born Citizen Rule

I am an American citizen from birth. I grew up in foreign countries and did not live in the United States for an extended time until I attended college. After college I lived and worked overseas for most of my career. When I turned thirty five I was eligible to become the next President of the United States of America. Many of my childhood friends enjoyed similar lives, growing up as American citizens in foreign countries before attending college in the U.S. and pursuing careers overseas. Unlike me, many of them cannot aspire to be the next President. I can, because I was born in a hospital in Glendale, California. They cannot because they were born in a hospital in Caracas, Venezuela. 

Section 1 of Article Two of the United States Constitution states:

“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.”

The Article is outdated and should be amended. In fact, I will argue that it is precisely these foreign born and raised Americans that we should strive more and more to put into political office, including the highest of them all. 

The Constitution was written and adopted during a different time. The U.S. was seeking independence from England. It made perfect sense back then to exclude foreign born Americans, especially those born and raised in England, from leadership roles in the fledgeling government. At the time there were many natural born citizens opposed to independence from England. Article Two simplified things. With it, the founding fathers could at least eliminate one group of potential political threats to the fragile government, and focus on the internal threat. Simple as that. It served its purpose at the time.

I lived a grand total of five weeks in the U.S. after I was born before my parents returned with me to Latin America, where my father spent most of his career working for American oil companies. I joined up with a lot of other new born American babies, only they were born in foreign countries. Their parents worked for American oil companies too. I am pretty sure that I had not, in the those five weeks, been brain-washed by the democratic American political system any more than my foreign born friends had been by the Latin American right wing dictatorial political systems of the time. We were babies, and our parents were all born in the U.S. and they were Democrats and Republicans and they voted and we all vacationed at Disneyland each summer.

Arnold Schwarzenegger cannot be President of the United States of America. Neither could ex-Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Henry Kissinger, although - strange at it may seem - he was actually the fourth in the line of succession to the Presidency behind the President, Vice-President and Speaker of the House. The list includes other prominent American citizens: Albert Einstein, founding father Alexander Hamilton, comedian and USO legend Bob Hope, Alexander Graham Bell and naval hero John Paul Jones, to name a few. They could never be President, even if they had been so inclined. For them, Article Two makes sense, sort of, especially for the ones who spent their formative years as citizens of foreign countries. 

Take Schwarzenegger. He was born and raised in Austria in 1947, a few years after Word War II. His father had fought in the German army and was a Nazi and a member of the Sturmabteilung, the paramilitary organization that was crucial to Hitler’s rise to power. So I suppose it could be that his son secretly embraced his father’s ideology. It could be that Arnold has had a plan all along and it is nefarious. You never know. Maybe he hates Jews. He is a Catholic. When he moved to the U.S., at the age of twenty one, he could barely speak English. The rest is history: the body building, the movie career and his governorship of California. But he will never be the President of the United States and, in a way, Article Two makes a little sense in his case. Just a little. 

But it does not make sense for the American kids I grew up with in South America, the ones who just happened to be born there. For the record, we were called Third Culture Kids, or TCK’s. David Pollock, Coauthor of Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, provides the following definition:

“A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parent’s culture. The TCK frequently builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership of any. Although elements from each culture may be assimilated into the TCK’s life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background.”

We should not exclude these people from the Presidency. On the contrary, we should open the door for them. The world has changed and so has America. Immigration, especially to the U.S. and Western Europe, has drastically changed our cultural and demographic landscape. Data from the 2000 U.S. Census on Ancestry is telling. People claiming ancestry from our original sources of immigrants during the Revolution - when the Constitution was written - has dropped dramatically from 1990 to 2000: 24.9% for English, 27.1% for Dutch, 21.2% for Irish, 26.1% for German, and 19.5% for French. We are all aware of the increase of immigration from Latin America, and the numbers bear it out. Truly eye-popping, however, is the increase of Americans claiming ancestry from less traditional, less ‘Christian’ places and cultures: 381.3% for Africans, 171.7% from Asian-Indian, 153.3% for Pakistanis, 92.1% for Vietnamese, 50.9% for Chinese and 43.6% for Iranians. Most of these people - these Americans - are here to stay, and they will remain different from ‘us’ for  a while. It takes time to adapt - them to us and us to them. You want to know who can knock on their doors and immediately get to know them better, and vice-versa? Want to know who gets what they’re feeling, knows what they face and what to say to them? Third Culture Kids, at least the adult versions of those TCK’s.

President Obama is an example of a TCK, except he was born in the U.S. He spent five years attending elementary school in Jakarta, Indonesia and, though that was the extent of his formative experience outside the U.S., he grew up in multi-cultural Hawaii, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother from Wichita, Kansas. It is not the classic TCK stereotype, but his time in Indonesia, from age six to ten, was smack in the middle of his formative years. He returned to Hawaii where he completed high school, later saying "The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear." His formative life experience in Indonesia probably had something to do with it too. 

Good thing Obama was born in Hawaii. If he had been born in his father’s homeland of Kenya, or even his step-father’s homeland of Indonesia - even if he only remained there for five weeks before returning home to U.S. soil - he could not have been elected President of the United States of America.

TCK’s bring a lot to table, especially to the political one. They are much more accepting of other cultures because they actually lived them. TCK’s are likely to speak two or more languages. They are four times more likely to obtain an undergraduate degree, and eight times more likely than non-TCK’s to obtain a graduate degree. Even so, it is not the classroom education that separates them from the rest. It is the real life education - the real ‘been there, done that’ kind.

My argument, so far, has focused on removing a single clause from Article Two of the Constitution. To do this, the text should be changed from “No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution...” to something more like “All persons born as citizens of the United States...”. But wouldn’t it be a shame to open up the Constitution and not take a whack at one or two other things? Maybe I’m getting off track a bit, but having established that the cultural and, therefore, religious landscape has changed so dramatically, maybe we should go ahead make one other little change - just to keep up with the times. I mean, as long as we’ve cut through the patient’s skin and we’re looking at the guts, let’s do a little preventive surgery, before things get a little more out of hand. There it is - that organ could use some fixing - the one that tries to maintain the separation of church and state. The First Amendment to the Constitution states:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...”

The idea here is to allow and respect all religions - all of them - and give no preference to any particular one. The founding fathers and almost all citizens of the new United States back in the late 1700’s were Christians, so they weren’t exactly contemplating the incredible religious mix we have nowadays. The idea was simply to keep (Christian) church matters separate from strictly political ones - the ones in the Constitution. It was done with the best intentions, just like the natural born rule in Article Two and, just like that one, it is no longer fit for purpose, but for a different reason. If the natural born rule is too specific and wrong to exclude foreign born Americans, the Constitution’s text on the separation of church and state is not specific enough.

If were are going to exclude certain groups of people from becoming President, shouldn’t it be religious leaders? Keep pastors, priests, rabbis, mullahs and other religious leaders from aspiring to lead the secular political machine of the United States. That certainly makes more sense than excluding foreign born Americans from that aspiration, doesn’t it? Religion will always motivate and deeply divide voters, but let them elect candidates that best reflect the moral and religious values they prefer, without putting Reverend Smith or Rabbi Goldberg in office. Which brings us back to the TCK’s, including those born overseas.

Like the overall cultural mix in the U.S., the TCK demographic has also changed dramatically.  Before World War II, 66% of TCK’s came from missionary families. Things have changed. Now only 17% of TCK’s are born into missionary families. The balance is 30% military, 23% government, 16% business and 14% ‘other’. It is a healthy mix, if a little heavy on the military side, but not surprising given the current state of affairs in the Middle East. More than half of TCK parents proudly work for or actively defend their country. Is it fair or right to exclude these children from leading that same country simply because Sergeant Jones’s son was born in a military hospital in Wiesbaden, Germany, or Ambassador Davis’s daughter was born in Lagos, Nigeria. 

To me, the answer is no. It is not fair - or prudent - to keep foreign born Americans from aspiring to be the next President of the United States. Americans are the greatest mix of races and cultures the world has ever witnessed. We are the cultural melting pot. Does it makes sense to exclude the most culturally diverse group of Americans from leading the most culturally diverse country in the world? Again, no. Article Two, Section 1 of the United States Constitution should be amended to include people born overseas to American parents - they should be able to lead this country. Instead, if we’re going to exclude anyone, make it American religious leaders, whether natural or foreign born. Two birds with one stone.