Possibilities for a Foreign-Born President

Vicki Haddock in the San Francisco Chronicle gives a summary of the issues around amending the Constitution to allow a naturalized citizen to become President: President Schwarzenegger?

I think such an amendment would be a good idea - even though it's the current popularity of Gov.-elect Schwarzenegger that's giving it currency, and I'm no fan of his. Her article includes this bit of historical insight:

So how did this provision get written into the Constitution to begin with?

"Remember that we were then a country of only 5 million people
stretched 2,000 miles from north to south and about 1,100 miles east to west.
Our borders were more than permeable. They didn't exist," said Tim Blessing,
director of the Penn State Presidential Performance Study. "Each state defined
citizenship in its own way.

"And if just one state naturalized somebody for whatever reason,
even a bribe, that's chaos. Any scoundrel could get in. The founding fathers
knew all about chaos. They knew all about scoundrels. And they wanted to protect
the new country from both."

There were rumors that members of Britain's royal family might
have designs on the presidency. It also sent shivers down the spines of the new
Americans to witness how Austria, Prussia and Russia infiltrated Poland and
carved up that country for themselves. Delegates to the Constitutional
Convention discussed the need for what John Jay termed "a strong check to the
admission of foreigners into the administration of our national
government."

It's may be rather imaginative to say that Austria, Prussia and Russia "infiltrated" Poland. But the carving-it-up part is definitely correct. But it does give an idea of the immediate international considerations that work at work in the late 18th century that went into that particular Constitutional provision.