Citizenship and residence requirements for presidents

Section 2 of Article 7 of the 1987 Constitution says, “No person may be elected President unless he is a natural-born citizen of the Philippines, a registered voter, able to read and write, at least 40 years of age on the day of the election, and a resident of the Philippines for at least 10 years immediately preceding such election.”

A couple of nights ago, I was discussing that provision with my 16-year-old daughter who was writing a paper on why the age and residence requirements were unnecessary. She stays near the university during weekdays, the discussion took place over Yahoo! Messenger and I thought she mistyped her message.

Unnecessary? I have to admit that I went blank for a couple of seconds. Like all Filipinos I know and have discussed the topic with—including all the law professors I’ve had, all my U.P. College of Law classmates and all lawyers I’ve ever talked to about it. Patriotism and nationalism, are not bred by the geographic and political boundaries of one’s birth or the race that one’s parents belong to. I’ve always accepted the beneficial substance of those requirements.

Why shouldn’t a President be required to be a natural-born Filipino citizen? A natural-born citizen, after all, is presumed to have an innate sense of patriotism and nationalism that would make him put the interests and welfare of the country on the forefront of his priorities.

Why shouldn’t he be required to have lived in the country for a certain length of time? Doesn’t that raise the presumption that he would be well-versed with current events and conditions from a first-hand perspective and, ergo, making him qualified to make informed and intelligent decisions on things that affect the country and the lives of the Filipinos?

I put forth those arguments to my daughter but I don’t know how she argued her case in her paper. I slept on the topic. A clear head the next morning and I had better answers. Too late for further discussions with my daughter, but not too late to write about.

The operative work is presumption. The citizenship and residence requirements are based on too many presumptions that are, at best, debatable. At worst, they are fallacious.

Patriotism and nationalism, in their best and most accepted context, are not bred by the geographic and political boundaries of one’s birth or the race that one’s parents belong to. The sense of patriotism and nationalism is something that is nurtured throughout one’s life.

Long-term residency does not automatically make a person informed about events and situations in his entire country. Being informed is an intentional act that starts with awareness and sustained by the desire to gather available information and be able to sort them out to get a clear and cohesive picture of the whole.

A natural-born Filipino citizen can spend all his life living in Metro Manila, studying in an expensive and cloistered Catholic school, never meet a poor resident of a slum area and never understand his plight except to consider him as an object of charity and pity.

A Filipino may be born in Tarlac or Ilocos or Pampanga yet remain unacquainted with Mindanao except for the occasional travel to the posh resorts in the area and never really comprehend the magnitude of the Christian-Muslim rift that has been raging for centuries.

And I consider the policies of past presidents and the current one and ask myself how anyone can really say that they have all worked for the interests of the country as a whole. I think about the social classes into which they were born, the long-standing enmity between the rich and the poor and how the status quo has been carefully preserved over the decades. I think about laws they have signed giving preferential treatment to foreign corporations in the exploitation of natural resources even when it meant displacing cultural minorities or depriving locals of livelihood.

I think about foreign investments incentives laws, Marcos’ fishing law, Arroyo’s mining law, Cory Aquino’s version of the agrarian reform law that exempted her family’s hacienda from getting broken up and distributed to tenant farmers. And then I think about the Mutual Defense Treaty Between the Republic of the Philippines and the United States and the RP-US Visiting Forces Agreement.

I don’t know how I could have ever believed, all these years, that the natural-born citizenship and residence requirements—both of which have been in force since the effectivity of the 1935 Constitution—were sensible and sagacious standards for judging the eminence of a person’s conscience and the value of his nationalism to qualify him to become President of the Philippines.

Are these requirements then mere expressions of the biases and limited perceptions of the framers of the various Constitutions that have been in effect over the decades? What about the age requirement? Isn’t there an embedded presumption somewhere that only people who have reached a certain age are mature and wise enough to be elected as a leader? Shouldn’t that be taken side by side with the presumption that the older and more experienced a person is, he is likely to be more well-versed in the arts of graft and corruption?

I’m honest enough to admit that I don’t have all the answers. But it is wise to ask questions beyond who will be the next President of the Philippines.