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On Thursday, August 27, Tolouse Olorunnipa reported on the attempts of Republican lawmakers to restrict the ability of naturalized and dual citizens to run for office. In several states, Republican lawmakers have introduced measures to cut those Americans out of candidacy for elected positions, while in Congress, at least five Republicans have called for prohibiting them from federal judgeships, Cabinet posts, ambassadorships, and congressional seats.
The push has come in the wake of the rise of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and other naturalized U.S. citizens whose policy positions those like South Carolina representative Nancy Mace consider un-American. These policies are, of course, the ones voters elected people like Mamdani to put into place. In her comments to Olorunnipa, Mace said: “This isn’t personal. It’s about what standard we want for the people entrusted with enormous power over the American people.”
Her word choice was revealing. Our elected officials are entrusted with the enormous power of the American people, not over them.
In the 1850s, Americans struggled over the question of equality and immigration. The United States had always been a nation of immigrants, but in the 1840s the failure of the potato crop in Ireland sent at least half a million Irish immigrants to the United States. As they moved into urban ports on the East Coast, especially in Massachusetts and New York, native-born Americans turned against them as competitors for jobs, warning that Catholics were un-American and could never assimilate into the U.S.
The 1850s saw a similar anti-immigrant fury in the new state of California. After the discovery of gold there in 1848, native-born Americans—the so-called forty-niners—moved to the West Coast. They had no intention of sharing the riches they expected to find. The Indigenous people who lived there had no right to the land under which gold lay, native-born men thought; nor did the Mexicans whose government had sold the land to the U.S. in 1848; nor did the Chileans, who came with mining skills that made them powerful competitors.
Above all, native-born Americans resented the Chinese miners who came to work in order to send money home to a land devastated by the First Opium War of 1839–1842, hoping to make money in America and then return to China, from which they could not legally emigrate. Expecting to go home again, they retained their languages, their culture, and their clothing. They tended to work the mines Americans had cleaned of their biggest deposits, focusing on meticulous reworking of the gravel, and they did better than native-born Americans thought they should.
Democrats and the new anti-immigrant American Party (more popularly known as the “Know Nothings” because members claimed to know nothing about the party) turned against the new immigrants, seeing them as competition that would drive down wages. In the 1850s, Know Nothing officials in Massachusetts persecuted Catholics and deported Irish immigrants they believed were paupers.
In 1850, in California, a legislature charged with establishing the legal framework for the proposed state adopted the federal law enacted a half-century earlier, in 1802, that limited citizenship to “free white persons.” The state legislature then went on to impose a foreign miner’s tax on Chinese and Mexican miners; then, in 1854, the state courts agreed that Chinese nationals could not testify in court against white Americans. In 1855 the legislature tried to stop Chinese immigration altogether by passing a $50 tax on shipmasters for each person ineligible for citizenship they brought to the state.
The construction of castes of immigrants mirrored the ideology of southern whites who enslaved their Black neighbors. As Georgia’s Alexander Stephens explained, the men who framed the Constitution had made the terrible error of believing in equality, and northerners stupidly clung to the outdated idea that Black people were equal to white people, “and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man.” In contrast to the United States government, men like Stephens believed that “subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
In 1855, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln wrote to his friend Joshua Speed to reiterate his dislike not just of enslavement, but also of the caste system going into place in places like Massachusetts and California.
“I am not a Know-Nothing,” he wrote. “That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of [Black Americans], be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except [Black people].’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except [Black people], and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty---to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.”
Lincoln understood that once you give up the principle of equality, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that people are unequal, and that some people are better than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, you have granted your approval to the idea of rulers and servants. At that point, all you can do is to hope that no one in power decides that you belong in one of the lesser groups.
Arguments that some men were better than others, “are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world,” Lincoln said. “You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent….”
“I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop,” he asked.
Americans answered him definitively in 1868 when they added the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It recognized that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It also established that states could not draw lines around different groups of citizens by providing that “[n]o State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That same constitution also establishes requirements for officeholders. The president must be at least 35 years old and a natural-born citizen of the United States. A U.S. senator must be at least 30 years old, a citizen of the U.S. for at least nine years, and a resident of the state they’re representing. A U.S. representative must be at least 25 years old, a U.S. citizen for at least seven years, and live in the state they represent.
Law professor Pamela Karlan told journalist Olorunnipa that “Those qualifications are exclusive. The state can’t add qualifications on top of those, nor indeed can the federal government.” Former representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) added that in a country growing more diverse, telling naturalized Americans that they can’t run for office will ensure they vote for the opposing party. “It is one of the dumbest tactical moves I’ve ever seen politicians make,” he told Olorunnipa.
Karlan summed up the idea of discriminating against naturalized citizens, telling Olorunnipa it is “just incredibly ugly, stupid, and unconstitutional.”
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Notes:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/naturalized-citizens-ban-elected-office-trump/688415/
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln2/1:339?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech
https://georgepwood.com/2012/07/04/abraham-lincolns-speech-at-chicago-illinois-july-10-1858/
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