Immigrants' kids in the White House

No American presidents have been born outside the United States or the territory that became the United States. Martin Van Buren was the first president born in the United States proper. His predecessors were all born in the part of British North America that became the United States in 1776.

A person born outside British North America could have become president in the early days of the republic. Alexander Hamilton, for example, born in the West Indies, could have been elected president. He wasn’t, because he wasn’t popular enough, and because he died from a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804.

The pertinent clause of Article II of the Constitution says, “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.” George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson met the alternative part of the requirement. So did William Henry Harrison.

After Harrison, all presidents were too young—that is, they were born after 1776. So they’ve had to be natural born citizens. No immigrants allowed.

But some presidents have been nearly immigrants. They’ve been children of immigrant parents. Jefferson’s mother was born in England. Both of Jackson’s parents were born in Ireland (Ulster), as were the fathers of James Buchanan and Chester Arthur. Woodrow Wilson’s mother was born in England. Herbert Hoover’s mother was born in Canada. Barack Obama’s father was born in Kenya. Donald Trump’s mother was born in Scotland.

If Kamala Harris is elected, she will be the second president, after Jackson, with two immigrant parents. Her father was born in Jamaica and her mother in India. She's not president yet. For all the enthusiasm surrounding her nomination, she still might lose to the most recent one-immigrant-parent president. But even as a candidate her background reveals changing attitudes toward immigration.

When Jackson was running for president, little mention was that he was the child of immigrants. Partly this reflected the fact that both of his parents died young. His father died before he was born and his mother when he was fourteen. Respect for the dead kept them out of the political conversation.

But the bigger reason was that his parents were utterly unexotic in the part of the country Jackson was from. Jackson was Scots-Irish in the Scots-Irish belt of the old Southwest. And he came to fame doing what the Scots-Irish were especially good at: fighting Indians. Fighting the British, at the 1815 battle of New Orleans, was a natural segue.

Most of the other presidents with immigrant parents encountered the same ho-hum reaction for the same reason. English, Scottish, Scots-Irish, Canadian—these hardly felt foreign to the majority of Americans with similar cultural roots.

The president who seemed the most dubious on cultural grounds was in fact the grandson and great-grandson of immigrants. John Kennedy's forebears were from the Irish part of Ireland—the southern, Catholic part. And it was his Catholicism rather than his Irishness per se that was an issue in the 1960 election. It didn’t keep him out of the White House.

Certain people, including Donald Trump, made much of Barack Obama’s ancestry, besides carrying on about where Obama himself might or might not have been born. Again religion was an issue. Obama’s father was born into Islam in Kenya but converted to Christianity as a boy. He later became an atheist. Obama himself was alleged, on no evidence other than his middle name, Hussein, to be a secret Muslim. As with Kennedy, the allegations failed.

It's hard to know what supporters and opponents will make of Kamala Harris as a child of immigrants. The fact that if elected she would be the first woman president is historically a bigger deal. But whether this will be a point of attack—and support—in the campaign is unclear.

Trump has already tried to parse out Harris's heritage, misleadingly alleging that she emphasized her blackness only lately, having stressed her South Asian roots previously.

In Obama's case it was sometimes said that he was of African descent rather than African American descent. To certain people this perhaps made a difference. Will something similar be said about Harris, that she is of African Jamaican and not African American descent? Will it matter?

One would think that the immigrant-heritage angle would be highlighted, given that immigration is a central point of debate between the two political parties. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. 

So far, the most noticed thing about Harris is that she is two decades younger than Joe Biden. But the election is more than two months away. Attention can shift.