Abdul Karim Hassan, a labor lawyer in Queens, is running for president.

A Guyana-born naturalized U.S. citizen, Mr. Hassan is looking at long odds. He has filed five lawsuits in which he argues that the Constitution's natural-born-citizen requirement is a vestige of our less noble past, before we decided that discrimination based on national origin is a grievous wrong. (He points in his briefs to Dred Scott v. Sandford.)

The...