Best of BS Opinion: Trump's citizenship rules may upend world order

Two of today's pieces weigh in on President Trump's proposed ban on birthright citizenship and its wider consequences.

Hello and welcome to BS Views, our newsletter that sums up today's opinion page. Our editorial as well as lead columnist weigh in on President Trump's proposed ban on birthright citizenship and its wider consequences. Our second columnist looks at what plagues India's manufacturing sector and how it might be fixed. 

  The first major shock of the Trump presidency was an executive order banning “birthright citizenship” in the US. As our first editorial points out, birthright citizenship is the norm in most countries that have inherited British common-law, including the US. President Trump's order faced legal pushback but the US Supreme Court has said that lower courts' decisions cannot amount to a nationwide overturning of the order. In short, the White House might be soon be able to start restricting birthright citizenship. The birthright citizenship law has held good since 1898, and has allowed the US to become a successful multi-ethnic society. That is what enrages some of Trump’s followers who oppose the idea that that anyone can be American. If birthright citizenship is indeed rolled back, then it will be an epochal shift in American identity and in its role in the world. 

 

The Indian Railways is set to increase fares starting July, a move that is expected to pull in revenue of roughly Rs 700 crore this fiscal year. However, as our second editorial argues, this bump is unlikely to change the dynamics of the railways’ revenue - given passenger fares account for less than a third of the total revenue - or help it fund infrastructure upgrades. Instead, losses are covered through cross-subsidies from freight operations and higher fares for premium travel, such as air-conditioned rakes. This, too, may be a losing proposition considering freight traffic has been losing out to road transport, while AC services account for a mere 5 per cent of passengers, forcing it to look to government grants and extrabudgetary support for capital expenditure. The real issue is the lack of clarity on its commercial and social objectives. Without rationalising these contrasting goals, the railways will struggle to become world-class.

 

Our lead columnist Mihir S. Sharma wonders if the West's experiment with open borders is coming to an end, given President's Trump ban on birthright citizenship and European nations' realisation that their openness might have had unintended consequences. Some of his advisors' and party colleagues' are even willing to seek to void citizenship rights of naturalised Americans. What is worrying is that these ideas are finding echoes across the Atlantic. Germany's decision to open borders to asylum-seekers from West Asia have had a ripple effect in the continent’s politics. In the UK, Brexiteers oversaw migration grow manifold from non-European nations, including India. As a result of populist backlash against what is seen as unbridled immigration, mainstream politicians across Europe are slowly closing the continent off, following hesitantly in Trump's footsteps about foreigners among their midst.

 

India's manufacturing sector and it's role as a solution to persistent issues of employment and economic growth have long been the subject of debate. While the need of the hour is more local manufacturing, points out our second columnist Debashis Basu, it's share in GDP has actually slipped further. The much-touted Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme hasn't quite taken off. A genuine manufacturing ecosystem takes years of reform which, in India's case, has been sporadic. Had it taken off, he says, it could have addressed both joblessness and poverty. Instead, the government has focused on cash transfers and welfare schemes, killing any incentive to work. India's demographic dividend, Basu warns, is fast turning into a demographic liability. 

 

Jennifer Szalai delves into COLLISIONS: A Physicist’s Journey From Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs by Alec Nevala-Lee, a biography of physicist Luis Alvarez. The Nobel Laureate's life, she says, was eventful but in seeking to deflate the myth of the audacious Alvarez, the author has overcorrected, jettisoning drama in favour of explanation. The result is a dutiful reading of Alvarez’s work in the laboratory and a strangely pallid portrait of the man himself. While the research is commendable, the book leaves one bleary-eyed and worn out, wanting more.