Best time to allow foreign borns to become president

According to the United States Constitution, Article 2 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".

With the recent attacks by Trump against Obama demanding to see a birth certificate(btw I'm a conservative and thank God the issue is done with) has got me wondering, when in the history of the United States would it have been easiest to amend the constitution to remove the qualification of having to have been a natural born citizen in order to be president?
 
According to the United States Constitution, Article 2 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".

With the recent attacks by Trump against Obama demanding to see a birth certificate(btw I'm a conservative and thank God the issue is done with) has got me wondering, when in the history of the United States would it have been easiest to amend the constitution to remove the qualification of having to have been a natural born citizen in order to be president?

Perhaps if Ulysses Grant had been foreign born? The Republicans were determined to have him as their candidate OTL and possesed sufficient power to force that amendment through.
 
Perhaps if Ulysses Grant had been foreign born? The Republicans were determined to have him as their candidate OTL and possesed sufficient power to force that amendment through.

Problem is if he had been foreign born would he have the same career as iOTL? Would the Republicans still be determined to have him as their candidate then?
 
I imagine Either it would have to be relatively Early in US history, or after some kind of disaster that wipes out most of the Line of Succession.
 

Cook

Banned
Why not just have the original wording of the Constitution read:

Article 2, section 1: ‘No person except a citizen of the United States shall be eligible to the Office of President.’
 
Problem is if he had been foreign born would he have the same career as iOTL? Would the Republicans still be determined to have him as their candidate then?
Indeed, he wouldn't even have been the same person. What I meant but didn't convey was a different person of foreign birth but having a similarly accomplished military career(and ideally even more glorious).
 
How about if the USA annexed another country, and someone who was born there before the annexation becomes president a couple of decades later?

AFAIK the person would still be considered a natural born citizen, seeing as how the USA has taken over the citizen of the country it just annexed. I'm not sure about that though.
 
How about if the USA annexed another country, and someone who was born there before the annexation becomes president a couple of decades later?

AFAIK the person would still be considered a natural born citizen, seeing as how the USA has taken over the citizen of the country it just annexed. I'm not sure about that though.

Puerto Rico, is that a possibility? Or can puerto ricans be elected to the presidency today?
 
How about if the USA annexed another country, and someone who was born there before the annexation becomes president a couple of decades later?

AFAIK the person would still be considered a natural born citizen, seeing as how the USA has taken over the citizen of the country it just annexed. I'm not sure about that though.

I don't think that a person born in pre-annexation Hawaii, let's say, of non-US citizen parents would be considered natural born citizens of the US after annexation. You'd have to look at the evolution of citizenship laws & Supreme Court decisions to know for certain, but I doubt it.
 
I don't think that a person born in pre-annexation Hawaii, let's say, of non-US citizen parents would be considered natural born citizens of the US after annexation. You'd have to look at the evolution of citizenship laws & Supreme Court decisions to know for certain, but I doubt it.

What about if, say, someone was born in the Republic of Texas before annexation to US-born/citizen parents?
 
I know Nixon discussed this with Kissinger. Maybe without Watergate he would have tabled a constitutional amendment

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
Why not just have the original wording of the Constitution read:

Article 2, section 1: ‘No person except a citizen of the United States shall be eligible to the Office of President.’

I agree. By far the easiest time to remove the "natural born' restriction would be when the Constitution was written.

It seems to me this is only becomes an issue when there is either an individual in the succession line who is not a natural born citizen (Kissinger in the 1970's) or an attractive potential candidate (like Schwartzenegger). This tends to make what should be a abstract legal decision a political one. Which is why it probably will never happen.

There is always room for confusion today because many Americans are born overseas and the status of US territories and offshore commonwealths can change. I suspect the laws on this are actually quite clear, but I don't know them and suspect most other Americans don't either.

Personally, since no other elected office in the USA has this restriction (except VP, maybe), I think the Constituted should be amended.
 
Puerto Rico, is that a possibility? Or can puerto ricans be elected to the presidency today?

They can.

Puerto Rico (as well as all other US protectorates or commonwealths or colonies or whatever the hell you call them) are legally US soil. Anyone born in it will be a US citizen by virtue of jus soli. This is the reason that John McCain can be president despite being born in Panama (the Canal Zone was US protectorate territory at the time). The same general idea applies to all other US non-state affiliated land (like, say, Washington DC for example).

I believe there is one exception, which is an island in the Samoas that is contended between Samoa and the USA, where if you are born on it you are a US national but not a US citizen.
 
I agree that the easiest thing would be not to have it in the Constitution originally. The reason they included it iOTL is so Congress couldn't invite over a foreign royal, declare him a citizen by a law specifically for the purpose, and then elect him President by impeaching both the President and Vice-President. To get around this, you could use some other mechanism to decouple Presidential eligibility from Congress. Maybe require him to have been a citizen for fourteen years before election?
 
One issue with having the Constitution being written to permit foreign-born individuals to become president was that at the time it was written, there were a lot of conspiracy theories floating around and general paranoia among the population and the framers about European monarchies trying to subvert the government in an effort to destroy a republic coming out of a successful rebellion lest it inspire their subjects to overthrow them or because they wanted America for themselves (with an added revenge motive for the conspiracy theories and paranoia concerning Britain.)

IIRC, one of the most feared forms of such subversion at the time was a scenario involving a wealthy foreign aristocrat who was really a foreign agent emigrating to the US, becoming a citizen, and through a combination of demagoguery and buying his way into office, would effectively gain control of the country and promptly betray the US to whatever monarch they were supposedly working for. The requirement that a person must have resided in the US for 14 years was in part intended to reduce the possibility that a natural-born citizen with presidential ambitions could be corrupted to play such a role, while the language about someone who was a citizen at the time of the adoption of the Constitution was pretty much inserted for the purpose of allowing Alexander Hamilton (born in Jamaica) a shot at the presidency.

The conspiracy theories and paranoia that fueled those fears and inspired the exclusion of naturalized citiziens from the presidency only really started to die out after the War of 1812, but even after then, the challenge for finding a good time to so amend the Constitution would involve finding a point where not only there wasn't any great wave of anti-immigrant and/or nativist sentiment, but that the issue wasn't clearly linked to a specific individual in the government or who would otherwise be an attractive candidate for one party, for the issue to come up and the questionable utility of the restrictions since the paranoia about foreign subversion they were designed to prevent turned out to be unfounded.
 
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