Bryan Garner has written what he calls a “legal memorandum” in The Atlantic which deserves a response. In essence he has concluded that Ted Cruz, The Canadian Cruzer, is most likely to be eligible to be President of the United States. I think he is leading his readers astray.
It's a legal opinion of some interest. However, it elides the real question, focusing primarily on statutes passed after the 1787 Constitution was ratified. And, of course, what was ratified is superior to any statute simply because it is the superior document. It's unfortunate that the author has conflated citizenship with presidential eligibility. They are not the same and never have been. It may well be that one can conclude that the statutes and the Constitutional language mean the same thing, but that seems illogical on its face. They were immigration statutes, not presidential eligibility statutes. Wasn't Congress simply trying to make certain that immigrants of a certain stripe would more easily be absorbed into society?
I admire the author's legal research, but believe he has established a red herring. Citizenship does not equal eligibility, at least in the lofty world of constitutional law. And, as he acknowledges, originalists would reject his analysis. Moreover, he adds Fourteenth Amendment equal protection concerns to his argument, but fails to persuasively explain why the Fourteenth has any bearing whatsoever on Art. II, fifth paragraph, which I quote.
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; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States.
What is more important, in my view, is a fair reading of the text. And, the author accepts that the first meaning is that of jurisdiction--i.e., the locus of the birth. Recall, too, that the new nation was quite familiar with the fact that the British monarchy had devolved to the House of Hanover, a German duchy. The loyalty of such a monarch was divided among Great Britain, Ireland and the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg (Hanover). George III was the Elector of that duchy, even becoming its king in 1814 when it became a kingdom (though well after our Constitution went into effect.) Can it be said that our nation's founders were in favor of foreigners becoming our head of state? Of course not. We had just ousted the foreigner George III by war. Clearly they thought such things to be an anathema to our republic.
Now, did the Founders write the Constitution with that concern in mind? This author fails to discuss those matters in any significant way, much less with any sense of importance. Accordingly, he simply doesn't answer his own question. Indeed, Garner may well have persuaded me that his "all-in-all" conclusion is wrong.