Trump, 'birthright citizenship' and the Gulf model
'Long live the King'
When the techbro vs MAGA ‘civil war’ first broke out in December 2024 over the question of H-1B visas and high-skilled immigration into the US, its implications for Indians and Indian-Americans – as the community that has received the lion’s share of those visas – were obvious. (It also, unsurprisingly, led to a huge surge of anti-Indian hate in the US). Then US President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning birthright citizenship.1
While lots of important questions emerged from that act, one reaction in particular jumped out to me. From India Today:
“"They did everything legally. Paid taxes for more than 20 years. Their US-born kids went to school here. But at 21, these kids must leave. Why? Parents are H-1B workers. Legal does not mean fair," wrote a person on X as chaos descends on the lives of millions of people in the US, including thousands of Indians. That's because of an executive order passed by US President Donald Trump on the first day of his office… Under the executive order passed by Trump, children born to people on work visas, like H-1B and L1, in the US won't be born as American citizens unless one of their parents is a Green Card holder or an American citizen….
"No citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents on H1B. This is going to throw a lot of family plans into jeopardy," a person wrote on X.
Now, the children of Indians who have work visas such as H-1B and L1s will not be naturalised citizens of the US. Many remain worried about the future of their children and their own as their American dream crumbles with Trump's return.”
One reason it caught my attention was because of how familiar the situation was to the hundreds of thousands of Indians who were either born in or moved to the Gulf as children: “they did everything legally, their kids went to school here, but at 21, these kids must leave.”
If you’re unfamiliar, more than nine million Indians live in the countries that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council2, a huge diaspora community that outnumbers the population of nationals in each of those nations, barring Saudi Arabia. (I am, myself, a member of this ‘Gulfie’ diaspora, a community whose under-examined histories – including a fascinating pre-oil presence – and unexplored futures are the subject of a longer writing project I’m hoping to dedicate time to).
Unlike the more prominent desi communities that migrated to the West, particularly the US, the UK and Canada, Indian who move to the Gulf do so knowing with certainty that they will not be gaining a new nationality, since naturalization pathways in those nations tend to be highly limited and exclusionary.
As a result, for most Indians, life in the region is even more precarious than that of an immigrant in the West: the job is your tether to the place and losing it comes with risks; retirement (or unemployment) means having to go back ‘home’ to India, even if you have spent many decades there; and for those who are building a family in the Gulf – a privilege not afforded to a significant swathe of the expatriate labour force – they do so in the knowledge that their children may not be able to stay, once they have become adults.
And yet, for a number of reasons, this set-up is not only seen as tolerable, but – with many caveats regarding who is doing the appraising – successful, and indeed aspirational. Is it any surprise that the Trump administration would be happy to emulate it?
I’m not suggesting that Trump’s citizenship policy is directly inspired by the Gulf. The US has enough in the way of cultural nativism to develop its own exclusionary approaches. Still the ‘Trump-Musk techbro’ preference of encouraging highly skilled immigrants to come to the US while explicitly taking away a path to citizenship, on one hand and, on the other, offering a $5 million ‘gold visa’ to whoever wants to buy their way in, does have obvious resonances. Even if it wasn’t a template for the US, Gulf societies might offer us a useful model to understand how an entirely different approach to immigration actually operates – and what that might mean.
It is also not the only Trump-as-a-Gulf-monarch analysis to pop up recently, given the affinity that the American president and his family have for the region. Here, for example, was
in February:“Donald Trump stirred controversy yesterday by referring to himself as a “king” on his social media after intervening to kill a wildly popular, remarkably effective New York City congestion pricing program. He certainly has been trying to rule like a king since retaking power… He might not actually be a king, in the sense of dynastic succession or a mandate from heaven — though the brazenness of his assault on constitutional order suggests that he is probably hoping for a Supreme Court ruling to effectively make him one. At what point should we start asking scholars who specialize on Middle Eastern monarchs what to expect?
…
To be clear, I don’t actually think that it makes sense to analyze Trump as a monarch. At least not yet. I still think Erdogan is a better comparison. But it always struck me that Trump felt far more comfortable in the world of kings and princes than most other American politicians (or academics, for that matter - we aren’t invited to those parties). Even before becoming president, he moved in those circles and fit in well with an ultra-wealthy world of impunity, corruption, personalistic power, and contempt for those not inside those elite circles. Trump may not be planning a dynastic succession (yet), and the ‘king’ remark likely remains more of a provocation than a real aspiration (at this point). But his actions over the last month - from the remaking of the bureaucracy to the brazen challenge to both Congress and the courts — make it less of a joke than it should be.”
And there was also Quinn Slobodian, in the New York Times earlier this month:
“The standard comparisons and analogies don’t quite capture President Trump’s particular economic vision. It is not really an extension of the Gilded Age robber barons, nor — despite his critics’ claims — is it akin to the fascist economic models of 1930s Germany and Italy.
There is another way of thinking about his brand of political economy and a potential model for it. We might think of the autocratic, oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf. Specifically, we might think of Mr. Trump’s vision as an attempt to transplant the political economy of Saudi Arabia onto the United States…
The Trumpist project is not about Making America great again in any traditional sense; rather, it is about reshaping America at least in part in the image of a modern petro-state — one that leverages energy wealth, luxury development and financial capital to exert influence on the global stage.”
For decades there were questions about whether the Gulf’s approach to citizenship would have to (very) slowly transform, with the implicit assumption being that it would move towards the Western model and allow at least some migrants to naturalise. What if, instead, as immigration fuels right-wing populism across the world, Western states find themselves looking more like the Gulf?
Read also:
On Indian Americans, Carnegie’s Sumitra Badrinathan, Devesh Kapur, Annabel Richter, and
have a new report on the community’s foreign policy attitudes that, among other things finds that “only about half of all respondents are aware of the allegations of India’s involvement in an attempted assassination on U.S. soil. A slim majority of respondents report that India would not be justified in taking such action and hold identical feelings about the United States if the positions were reversed.”Lots of other interesting findings in the full report.
Miscellany
Via Sundeep Dougal:
“A young woman, Swatantrata, stands in front of a microphone facing a mass gathering of more than 80,000 peasants from the Punjab in Lahore, some time in 1943. She sings a Heer, a traditional ballad of Northwestern India, which relates the story of a young girl from faraway Bengal who has lost her home and family to the ravages of a terrible famine.
The lyrics of the Heer, written by Sheila Bhatia, a prominent songwriter of the left cultural movement in Lahore at the time, are as follows:
kinuuN phol dassaaN dukh dard saiyyoN
meraa rog taaN laa-ilaaj disse
kar kaaT saaiN kaanuuN chhutthe maittho
kyuuN sawaal ae binaa jawaab disseTo whom can I tell my sad story?
Who can cure me of my malady?
I have lost my home and family:
Who can answer my innumerable questions?
Interestingly, this particular Heer did not recount a local story, as would appear from the customary description of the centuries-old love story of Heer–Ranjha. It used a local, indigenous form to ask for solidarity from peasants in the Punjab towards peasants in Bengal. The Heer, an evocative lament for things lost, appealed for comradeship based on new solidarities between peasantries, between people across long distances who shared their opposition to colonialism.The gathering had been organized by the All India Kisan Sabha (Peasants’ Organization) that worked closely with the Communist Party of India (CPI) to generate awareness about the devastating Bengal famine.
The programme on the said day consisted of songs and speeches by communist and peasant leaders, many of whom were underground and appeared in public only briefly during the rally. Swatantrata’s powerful singing was riveting and served a purpose: it drew attention away from the activity going on backstage – the arrival and departure of ‘underground’ speakers who ran the risk of being arrested, and who would become ‘visible’ only when they were ready to make a speech.
Many decades later Swatantrata recalled how the Heer had reduced large numbers in the audience to tears; in fact some of the peasants, thinking she had sung her own story, met her in the streets of Lahore the next day and offered her food and shelter. Sheila Bhatia, who later moved to Delhi and became a prominent theatre person, became well known for using the many forms of the indigenous Heer in her theatre productions.
// This is a short excerpt from Sumangala Damodaran's book 'The Radical Impulse: Music in the Tradition of the Indian People’s Theatre Association'. For more, please see here.
Whether the order holds will depend on how courts respond to what many have described as an unambiguously unconstitutional act. A number of courts have indeed asserted that, but this will most likely go all the way to the top.
Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.