Noah Feldman, Columnist

The American President Doesn't Have to Be Born American

Repealing the natural born citizen requirement would send a strong pro-immigration message.

April 24, 2018 at 8:38 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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Conservative law professor Kevin Walsh, in an intriguing new article, makes the case for repealing the “natural born” citizenship requirement for the presidency. Next month it will be 150 years since such a proposal for a constitutional amendment was first put before Congress. Today it really makes no sense to discriminate against naturalized citizens when it comes to the presidency, assuming it ever did in the first place.

I can think of three further reasons that the timing is right. For one, between election cycles, it isn’t about possible candidates who were born abroad: Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jennifer Granholm or Ted Cruz (who probably isn’t barred anyway). It’s about the principle on its own.