On Wednesday, in Arizona, Donald Trump will deliver a speech about immigration. He has already all but abandoned his once-rock-ribbed insistence on expelling millions of illegal immigrants from the United States, hinting instead that those who have been law-abiding residents for decades might be allowed to stay. In this presidential election cycle, that qualifies as a remarkable concession.

For the Republican nominee and his fans on the American “alt-right” – and to the horror of progressives everywhere – stoking fears of foreign infiltration has proved to be a winning political strategy, even if Trump’s recent course correction suggests some recognition of its limits. Still, however corrosive it may be, Trump’s rhetoric has an unimpeachable American pedigree; its roots lie in the U.S. Constitution itself.

“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.” So states the “presidential eligibility clause.” There is scholarly debate over the meaning of the phrase “natural born Citizen,” but there is no dispute that, unless a citizen is “natural born,” he or she is ineligible for the presidency.

The presidential eligibility clause was, in a way, the spark that ignited the Trump conflagration. Had he not been so publicly curious, in 2011 and 2012, about the circumstances of President Barack Obama’s birth, Trump might not now be the Republican nominee. The “birther” movement begat his base.

Still, in recent years, the constitutional provision has largely escaped scrutiny. In July 2003, a month before Arnold Schwarzenegger launched his successful gubernatorial campaign in California, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah proposed his Equal Opportunity to Govern Amendment, which would have opened the presidency to immigrants. Though Schwarzenegger’s election and re-election kept the issue alive, Hatch’s proposal never gained traction.

In the years since, public attention has focused not on whether the “natural born” requirement ought still to exist, but rather on whether it bars a particular person from the presidency. First Obama, then Senator Ted Cruz, then Senator Marco Rubio – each saw his qualifications questioned on the same basis, and by the same man: Donald Trump.

To laugh off the question is one thing. To say it ought to be irrelevant is another. It may not have been in 1787; for the Framers, restricting the presidency to those who had been born in the newly independent states – or who had become citizens by the time the new Constitution went into effect – was a means of self-preservation, to guard against plots planned abroad.

Nearly 230 years later, it is an anachronism. The presidential eligibility clause embodies a distrust of immigrants that ought to be out of place in a country built by them. And yet, Trump has sustained his candidacy on paranoid xenophobia – an historical fact that no amount of wobbling on mass deportation will change. Even if Trump’s rhetoric falls flat this November, as nearly all polls suggest it will, its close relative will still be written into America’s most important founding document, in its most important job description.

All of which makes progressive Americans’ acquiescence difficult to defend. In an election in which voters will finally have to answer a question that would have been unimaginable in 1787 – namely, would you vote for a woman for president? – Trump’s rhetoric raises another: Would you vote for a presidential candidate who was a naturalized U.S. citizen?

The two questions are alike. Each is a test of openness. It is easier to profess a belief in true equality than to practice it, and few things smoke out prejudice better than a ballot box. Just as, in practical if not legal terms, neither the current president nor his likely successor could serve in that office without amendments to the Constitution – the Fourteenth and Nineteenth, respectively – so too will opening the presidency to the last legally excluded group of citizens require constitutional change.

More than two centuries after its ratification, the U.S. Constitution endures as one of the most democratic and celebrated documents on earth. Yet, as Trump’s supporters continue to demand deportations, progressives should remember that American law still puts a ceiling on recent arrivals’ dreams. It may prove to be the highest and hardest of all.

Adam Goldenberg is a lawyer in Toronto.

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