The United Arab Emirates (UAE), comprising the well-known Abu Dhabi and Dubai, as well as five smaller units, due to their fabulous oil wealth, are one of the world’s biggest migration magnets. In a development that really took off not before the 1990s, a tiny citizenry of just one million is host to over eight million labor migrants today. This makes for the highest concentration of foreign residents worldwide. But practically none of them has the chance of ever becoming an Emirati citizen. Officially, they are not even “migrants” but “guest workers”, even though many of them are there for good, and not a few for several generations already.

In 2008, the UAE raised eyebrows by buying Comoros Islands citizenship for its domestic bidun minority. This was a fake citizenship without residence rights or diplomatic protection for the bidun in this impoverished statelet east of Africa. But in principle, at least, it made it possible to make this group deportable, if only in effect to discipline it, because deportation was never actually on the table. The estimated 80,000 to 120,000 bidun have mostly lived in the UAE since the state was founded in 1971, but they escaped state registration or lacked the Arab tribal pedigree for full Emirati citizenship. Comprising a variety of ethnic groups (Persian, East African, Indian, even some Arab), the umbrella term bidun (Arabic for “stateless”) is a misnomer, because many of them held Emirati passports when they were forcibly turned into “Comoros”. What they crucially lacked was the “family book” (khulasat) that is required for full federal Emirati citizenship. Gateway to the oil rent (the equivalent of USD 55,500 per year in free services and subsidies for the average male Emirati), the “family book” is only available to those who can trace their Arabic patrilineal descent on UAE territory back to 1925—a date long before the discovery of the black gold, and thus meant to forfeit instrumental citizenship acquisitions. In fact, the Emirati leaders’ Comoros deal turned Emirati citizens (of a lesser kind) into foreigners, “offshore citizens”, as Noora Lori calls them in the title of her excellent book that is under review here.

Offshore Citizens is an impressive achievement, in two respects. First, it provides a first-hand, richly documented, and vividly presented picture of the immigration and citizenship experience in one of the world’s most perplexing regions, where futuristic modernism and staggering wealth meet tribalism and categorical exclusion, particularly of those who work. Because “work” the typical Emirati citizen does not do or only pro forma (in the lavishly funded and predictably underperforming public sector). Emirati citizens are rentiers, and best described as living-off the work done by foreigners.

Secondly, and more ambitiously, Offshore Citizens is more than a case study because more-than-usual attention is devoted to the question of what it is a case of. It theorizes “limbo statuses” and “precarious citizenship” as typical responses to immigration that also exist elsewhere. Accordingly, the Emirati creation of “permanent temporary status” for its labor migrants and domestic minorities is “an extreme but not anomalous case” [233]. Lori attacks a rigid citizen-alien binary that she finds in much of the literature, and she disagrees with a schematic opposition between “inclusive” liberal democratic states and “exclusive” autocratic rentier states (that I proposed in Joppke 2017Footnote ¹). Instead, she argues in favour of “an inclusive/exclusive spectrum” [31, emphasis supplied], in which states respond to immigration not in terms of either-or but of more-or-less. Indeed, as she forcefully retorts against a sort of Western triumphalism (a word she does not use), “the institution of citizenship, since its earliest manifestations, has critically depended upon the labor of those who are outside the body politic” [21]. In other words, hers is an attempt to normalize the exclusivist Emirati response to immigration and ethnic minorities, to allow it to appear less exotic and closer to what other states, in particular Western states, have done in the past, and continue to do in the present.

As I consider this comparative-minded normalization of excluding labor migrants and minority groups in the Gulf the main theoretical claim of her book, it is worth further examining it. In my reading, the legal and political literature on immigration and citizenship has never operated in terms of a citizen-alien binary, as if there were no in-between statuses, either in fact or normatively. On the contrary, almost all of the discussion, from Tomas Hammar’s “denizenshipFootnote ²” on, was about in-between statuses, and about their viability and durability (most provocative, because endowed with normative dignity, the “postnational membership” by Yasemin SoysalFootnote ³). In that respect, the “liminal zone of individuals who are not citizens, but are not aliens either” [239], which is to replace the citizen-alien binary at the theoretical plane, is not new, simply because reality had never operated in this way. However, when Virginie Guiraudon, for instance, spoke of “citizen right for non-citizensFootnote ⁴”, the sense of it, as in the “denizen” and “postnational member” variants before her, was upbeat, because immigrants were deemed sufficiently protected in these statuses that remained short of citizenship, so that the latter was normatively off the table.

In the meantime, reflecting a generally restrictive policy trend in rich OECD societies since the late 1990s, the discussion of in-between statuses has turned more downbeat, as impairing those who hold or rather are caught in them. “Stratified” immigrant rights and statuses, as Lydia MorrisFootnote ⁵ was the first to put her finger on, express the sovereign control interests of states, and there has been an impressive proliferation of such stratification ever since. One example is the increased prominence of the status that is of central concern to Lori: temporary status. Not mentioned by her, even classic immigrant nations like Canada preferentially recruit temporary migrants today, including the highly skilled. This is for the sake of optimized selectivity, and relegating the cost of integration to migrants who need to “earn” their way into the host society. With an eye on Canada, the erstwhile liberal model of an inclusive immigration and citizenship regime that recently took on neoliberal colors, Catherine Dauvergne darkly diagnosed the “loss of settlement”, as the recruitment of migrants is no longer for nation building but for economic profitability: “states no longer need people but rather ‘widgets’”, she pithily concludesFootnote ⁶.

While temporary statuses are having a high conjuncture across the Western arc, even for high-skilled immigrants, absolutely unknown there is the “permanent temporary status” that Lori has diagnosed for the Gulf. It is true that permanent residence, and with it the transition to citizenship, is everywhere more accessible to high- than to low-skilled migrants, and this distinction is ever more bolstered under the neoliberal North Star of “human capital”Footnote ⁷. However, low-skilled migrants are not in principle excluded. Unless spent in illegality, and exactly opposite to the Gulf where time spent is under all conditions “suspended” [24], time spent on Western soil creates a claim for permanent status for all legal migrant categories. Joseph CarensFootnote ⁸ theorized it as “social membership”, which in German law, for instance, is incarnated in the principle of Aufenthaltsverfestigung Footnote ⁹ (consolidation of residence). As mentioned, an exception is time spent in illegality. If it were otherwise, states would be deprived of the possibility of controlling migration in toto. But even here there are limit cases and possible transitions—examples are the undocumented “childhood arrivals” in the United States, for some of whom (not all!) President Obama had passed an amnesty that could not really be undone under the Trump presidency [201].

A further, particularly tricky exception to the Western “time counts” principle, also mentioned by Lori [43-56], is what in the US is called “temporary protected status” for rejected asylum seekers. Under German law, the equivalent is Duldung (toleration), which temporarily lifts a deportation order. Again, if these temporary statuses could be routinely converted into permanent residency, states could not control migration any longer. Concretely, the distinction between asylum and labor migration would be eroded, and an incentive provided to (ab)use the asylum system for moving freely into a high-income country. But, tellingly, there are again limit cases that breach principled temporariness. Most blatantly in Germany, whose migration law has taken a little noticed cosmopolitan turn like few others in the world, this breach has become known as Spurwechsel (track change), first introduced after the Syrian refugee crisis 2014-2015. It allows rejected asylum seekers with a work contract or an apprenticeship to “switch” to the labor migration track, which comes with the possibility of permanent residency.Footnote ¹⁰ Controversial because of its erosion of the distinction between asylum-seeking and labor migration, and thus not included in the 2019 Fachkräfteeinwanderungsgesetz for medium-skilled labor migration, the Spurwechsel is part of the “Coalition Agreement” of the new federal government entering in late 2021, and likely to become law in 2022. In rather wokish language, bearing the signature of the Greens, this agreement speaks of generic “people who come to Germany”, which erases the asylum-seeker v. labor migrant distinction, all of whom shall be offered a “speedy integration”Footnote ¹¹.

Accordingly, the Gulf states’ “permanent temporary status” should be looked at as what it is: a sui generis or “anomalous” and not just an “extreme” case, to turn Lori’s central claim around [233]. The anomaly of permanent temporariness is even more grating for the domestic bidun, who were fobbed off with the shoddy Comoros citizenship. Even the UAE government seems to have realized the enormity of de-nationalizing a domestic minority group: it insists, however hypocritically, that this was a necessary “interim step” for eventually granting them full Emirati citizenship (that in reality never arrives). In essence, the bidun were told to “need a passport to get a passport” [206], which is not the least Kafkaesque element in this episode. To turn a domestic minority, who never could call any other place home, into foreigners, it should be said, is different in kind from foreclosing permanent residency and citizenship to foreign migrants, who in the UAE tend not to apply in the first for something that is not in their reach.

As Lori perhaps does not sufficiently consider, we are thus dealing with two different kinds of group, native minorities and labor migrants, which in liberal states are treated legally and politically separately, the former always more generously than the latterFootnote ¹². Their joint relegation to “permanent temporary status” and categorical exclusion from citizenship thus calls for an explanation. But it is not likely to be found in deeming this treatment not so different from what Western states do, on the assumption that “states across regime types can be inclusive toward some groups, exclusionary toward others” [23]. This would call for a group-specific, contingent explanation, irrespective of “regime type”. But what is striking is the jointly exclusive stance toward domestic minorities and migrants in the Gulf, compared with the jointly inclusive stance across (most) migrant statuses in Western states—not to mention that to de-nationalize a domestic minority group is entirely anathema there (no reminder is necessary that this was the first step to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany).

In my view, the most plausible explanation for this fundamental difference is to be found in the rentier nature of the Gulf states and their correspondingly tribal citizenship. Of course, Lori is not far away from this, and in a brief section of her book she reflects on “rentier citizenship” in “rentier states” [18-19]. But she immediately drops the ball in favour of a group- rather than regime-specific, “spectral” rather than “binary” account [20-23]. This is a pity, because one also finds in her book a very detailed and eye-opening contrast between Abu Dhabi and Dubai’s radically different approaches to immigrant and minority incorporation, which puts flesh on the rentier state hypothesis that she never really develops.

In a nutshell, a rentier state lives off natural resources rather than the work of its members. Accordingly, there is a need to tightly limit access to membership, because enlarging it would spread the resources thin and make less available to each. The logic is zero-sum. By contrast, in a work-based state, new members are a resource in themselves, as they are potentially productive and can be taxed. The logic is positive-sum. Irrespective of political regime type, say, autocratic v. liberal democratic, one can thus deduce that rentier states are exclusive or “tribal” while work states are inclusive. Importantly, the autocracy v. liberal democracy distinction certainly reinforces this distinction, but it is not the gist of it.

Lori’s comparison between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, two autocratic polities with diametrically opposed approaches to immigrant and minority incorporation, amply illustrates the simple rentier- v. work-state contrast. Back in 1967, a British colonial officer noted that in Dubai “one finds a mixed community living in apparent harmony whilst… Abu Dhabi nationals exhibit none of the tolerance towards foreigners which is so characteristic of Dubai [85]”. Apparently, already before the oil boom started in earnest, Abu Dhabi had been “much more ethnically homogeneous than Dubai”, drawing its income not from maritime trade but from settlements and inter-desert trade [88]. By contrast, “the Gulf Shoreline”, exemplified by Dubai, “was an ethnically heterogeneous and polyglot space for centuries” [54], mixing Persians, East Africans, and especially Indians. The arrival of oil greatly increased this difference. Importantly, 90% of the Emirati oil reserves are controlled by Abu Dhabi. By contrast, Dubai continued to draw its income from business and trade—still in 2008, 90% of its GDP is non-oil based [86, fn. 20]. While the ruling families in both places have the same tribal affiliations [85], Dubai and Abu Dhabi developed radically different economies: Dubai’s is based on mobile assets, trade and finance, while Abu Dhabi’s became ever more based on one fixed asset, oil. This entailed different social “incorporation practices”: “expansive” in Dubai, and “more restrictive” in Abu Dhabi [86]. As a result, after the founding of the federal state, a “dual system” of immigration and citizenship emerged [89].

Importantly, however, the arrival of oil shifted the balance of power away from Dubai, where it had traditionally been, to Abu Dhabi, the new capital of the state and controlling the federal government, including the Department of the Interior. Only the latter hands out the all-important “family book”, which is an Abu Dhabi invention that corresponds to its rentier state outlook. As Lori reports [86], all stalled naturalization cases by bidun, before they were finally de-nationalized in 2008, had originated from outside Abu Dhabi, whose rulers were always anxious not to brusquely undo the more inclusive citizenship decisions of Dubai or one of the lesser emirates. Hence the contorted Comoros “outsourcing for conditional inclusion” [86]. By contrast, non-tribally-pure citizenship applications that originated in Abu Dhabi were immediately rejected, without subjecting their applicants to the ordeal of endless waiting that is grippingly described in this book.

Stated as a counterfactual: Lori’s Dubai-Abu Dhabi contrast suggests that without Abu Dhabi’s oil-wealth-based dictation of the UAE immigration and citizenship policy, there would be no “permanent temporary status in the Gulf”, to quote the subtitle of her book [ch. 2]. On the contrary, a non-oil UAE would have a policy more in the image of non-rentier and cosmopolitan Dubai. Note that as a post-oil future is on the horizon, the walls of tribal citizenship are becoming brittle. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which are classic rentier states like Abu Dhabi with similarly exclusivist immigration and citizenship policies, have recently introduced permanent residency, if only for the highly skilled, while the Emirates have taken a step in this direction by introducing a ten-year residence status [158].Footnote ¹³

As oil recedes, tribal citizenship and the paradox of “permanent temporary status” is likely to become a matter of the past. In terms of Gulf State “citizen making”, the future has already arrived. The same Abu Dhabi rulers that still require a tribal Arab pedigree for access to its citizenry have also embarked on a “neoliberal developmental agenda” in its education system. It seeks to beat the Emirati youngsters’ unproductive and costly “rentier mentality” with a new ethos of “personal drive, individual sense of purpose, and motivation to achieve”, to make them ready for globalization and the “knowledge society” of the futureFootnote ¹⁴. Naturally, Koranic rote learning has no place in this. Interestingly, neoliberal social engineering in the UAE, which is cast in stone on Abu Dhabi’s artificial Saadiyat Island that houses branches of New York University and of the Louvre and Guggenheim art museums, does not appear to endanger autocracy—“For that, the people would have to get out of their (air-conditioned) cars”, as one Emirati sheikh quippedFootnote ¹⁵. Because neoliberalism is precisely defined by bracketing democracy and political participationFootnote ¹⁶, the UAE autocrats indeed need not be afraid of it.

In concentrating on its interesting but contestable central theoretical claim, I have been short on highlighting many of the nuggets that can be found in Lori’s Offshore Citizens. Among them, there is the imaginative attention throughout to the uses of “time” in the making and controlling of national boundaries; a sociologically compelling account of the kafala system unique to the Gulf, which privatizes immigration control but—as we surprisingly learn from Lori—not only exploits but to a degree protects labor migrants through informal social ties and commitments (ch. 4); there is ethnographic precision about the biduns’ “waiting” for naturalization decisions that never come, which also captures raw state power in action [ch. 5]; last but not least, there is the as yet most detailed and hilarious (if it weren’t serious) story of the Comoros “passport outsourcing” [ch. 6].

Most importantly, while much of the recent scholarship on the Gulf has tried to read the neoliberal future into the regionFootnote ¹⁷, Lori’s Offshore Citizens unsparingly exposes the weight of the tribal past in this unique experiment of bridging times and civilizations.