Who cares where a President was born?

By: Darrell Laurant | The News & Advance
Published: April 20, 2011

In Arizona, a group of lawmakers with nothing better to do recently came up with a bill that would require any presidential candidate to produce a valid U.S. birth certificate before he or she could appear on the state's ballot. The governor, Jan Brewer, vetoed it.

It seems pretty obvious that this is all about discrediting Barack Obama. Arizona is also the state that held out the longest against a Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday -- and, last year, passed a law allowing police to stop and interrogate people just because they look ... foreign. If Obama could be proven to be black (or half black) and foreign, this nativist cactus crowd could not only keep him off the ballot, but perhaps stop him at the Arizona border.

To me, though, it goes well beyond Obama. Why does it matter where a President was born? Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was born in Austria; Michigan Gov. Jennifer Grandholm in Canada. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright drew her first breath in Czechoslovakia.

Not concidentally, Albright has become one of the more high-profile proponents of a Constitutional amendment allowing naturalized citizens to run for America's highest office.

"We are a country of immigrants," Albright said. "I think that it would be not a bad thing to try to figure out how to allow foreign-born people to become president."

There would have to be conditions attached. I don't think we would want to see a wave of immigrants granted U.S. citizenship in January just so they could run for president in November. So build in a time requirement -- 10 years as a U.S. citizen, perhaps, or even 25.

We, of all countries, should be open to this. The United States is the most diverse nation on the face of the earth, proud of its self-proclaimed status as a "melting pot." When you look back at our intellectual and cultural history, some of our greatest accomplishments as a nation have been carried out by immigrants.

What if Albert Einstein had wanted to run for president? Sorry -- he was born in Germany.

We quote the inscription on the Statue of Liberty all the time: "Give us your poor, your huddled masses, etc."

As long as none of the huddled masses want to get on the presidential ballot. Especially not in Arizona.

Who cares where a President was born?

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