Counter to Trump's Plan to End Birthright Citizenship? Allow Naturalized Citizens to Be President

As we have come to learn in the past few weeks, the 14^th Amendment creates birthright citizenship for “all persons.” Liberals and many conservatives—for example, George Conway— have been pushing back on President Trump’s idea to limit birthright citizenship.

What if liberals and moderates went on the offensive by suggesting broader immigration rights?

The following is an excerpt from my research paper… the part in red deals with the idea that the Constitution currently limits the office of president to people born in the U.S. Talented public figures, ranging from Alexander Hamilton, Henry Kissinger, and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Madeleine Albright and Ariana Huffington, have been constitutionally barred from office.

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The Constitution has shaped the presidency along racial lines. This effect is more subtle today but was exploited when President Trump spent years as a private citizen falsely suggesting that President Obama was born in Kenya. Twenty million naturalized citizens—mostly nonwhite—are ineligible to be president because they were born outside the U.S. The fact that twelve of the first eighteen presidents were slave-owners is evidence that the Three-Fifths Compromise skewed elections for the nation’s highest office to favor slave-holding interests. The Constitution’s regulation of the “Migration or Importation” of slaves is a conflicted expression of the nation’s first immigration policy: the nation allowed the more benign form of slave “migration” that was common with French settlers and the brutalizing “importation” of chattel slavery. The Constitution drafted in 1787 set the course for a presidency that—for most of the next 230 years— was institutionally inclined to translate the racial animus of white Americans, particularly white workers, into restrictive immigration actions. In this context, President Trump’s racially-tinged immigration campaign messages, closely tied to restrictive immigration policies, should not come as a surprise: He is a culmination of a flawed Constitution.