You don’t have to be born in the United States to be president, but you do have to meet the constitutional eligibility requirements. Direct answer
- The U.S. Constitution requires the president to be a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the Adoption of the Constitution. In practice, this is interpreted to mean a person must be a natural-born citizen or, in some cases, a citizen who was already a U.S. citizen at the time of the Constitution’s adoption in 1789. This is the key birthplace-related requirement.
Key points to know
- Age: The president must be at least 35 years old.
- Residency: The president must have at least 14 years of residence in the United States.
- Natural-born status: The core constitutional phrase is “No Person except a natural born Citizen… shall be eligible to the Office of President.” The interpretation of “natural-born” has been a long-standing constitutional question with various scholarly analyses, but the text itself sets the foundational criterion.
What this means for birthplace
- Being born outside the U.S. generally disqualifies a person from meeting the natural-born citizen requirement unless the person was a U.S. citizen at birth under certain historical circumstances (e.g., being born abroad to U.S. citizen parents under certain laws in effect at the time). Modern presidential eligibility still centers on the natural-born status as defined by constitutional interpretation and applicable statutes.
If you’d like, I can pull up a quick summary of the constitutional text and a few scholarly interpretations to clarify how “natural-born citizen” has been understood over time.
