Immigrants for President: Why the foreign-born should be allowed to compete for the big job.

When President Bush spoke at Ellis Island on July 10, his speech was full of patriotic boilerplate: "America at its best is a welcoming society." It was a ho-hum address that just about any president might have given. Praising America's immigrant tradition in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty is like making nice with farmers at the county fair: a job requirement for public officials.

Buried in Bush's remarks, however, was a comment that deserved notice. A group of immigrants were taking the oath of citizenship that day, the final step in their naturalization. "This is one of the things that makes our country so unique," said Bush. "With a single oath, all at once you become as fully American as the most direct descendant of a Founding Father."

That's almost true. Right beside Bush were two members of his own cabinet who wouldn't be allowed to succeed him as president, even though they're both citizens: labor secretary Elaine Chao, who was born in Taiwan, and housing secretary Mel Martinez, who is from Cuba. The Constitution is pretty clear on this point: "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."

In other words, an immigrant won't ever call the shots from behind the big desk in the Oval Office-unless the Constitution is amended. This is not done easily, but it is something the Bush administration ought to consider seriously. One senior official calls the idea "intriguing" and says it has been tossed around at least informally. Pursued wisely, such an amendment has the potential to force millions of voters to take a fresh look at their president.

Altering the Constitution is a grave act, and the first step in even considering it is to know why the document says what it does. The prohibition against immigrant presidents, however, was not the subject of much debate by the Founders, partly because it was a late addition. Yet it is not hard to guess at their reasoning. They probably recognized that many European kings weren't born in the lands they ruled, and wanted to take America in another direction. They also may have believed that the country's chief elected official must possess an inborn sense of American culture. At a time when a newly independent United States was struggling to find its place in the world, this was understandable-though it's also worth noting that the drafters included a loophole permitting foreign-born people living at that time to become president. (The eminent constitutional scholar Edward S. Corwin wryly observed that founder James Wilson "seems to have felt the need of such a clause in his own behalf especially keenly.") So the concept of a foreign-born president was not off-limits to the Founders, and they understood that historical circumstances might warrant different rules.

Today, it is hard to imagine voters electing a foreign-born candidate who wasn't in essence an American. An immigrant president most likely would embrace the United States with the fervor of a convert-a flag- waving nationalist whose public displays of love for country would match Joe Lieberman talking about his faith. People would start rolling their eyes by the third Pledge of Allegiance in every stump speech. This candidate, too, probably would have been raised in the U.S. since early childhood, making him a product of American culture. At the very least, the president would not be fresh off the boat: The Constitution already requires any president, even a native, to have lived in the U.S. for 14 years.

One of the wonders of American culture, of course, is the spectacle of people becoming American. We call this assimilation or, less clinically, Americanization. It is a rough process that affects people in different ways. On an individual ...