Staying, on Purpose: The Politics of Migrant Permanence in Dubai

January 2026, Giulia Zaccaria

Introduction

Dubai’s demographics present a unique puzzle, often seeming like an optical illusion rather than typical city. As of 2023, roughly 88-90% of its population is foreign born, a proportion so extreme that it essentially erases the line between “host society” and “migrant community” (Gulf Labour Markets, Migration & Population Programme, 2018). While migration is anticipated, given the city’s focus on hyper-growth and ambitious development cycles, the central paradox is that so many migrants remain, sometimes for decades, within a labor system explicitly designed. Permanence, on paper, was was never intended to be a part of Dubai’s economic model.

And still, workers stay. Dominant literature on the Gulf usually treats migrant duration as an accidental byproduct of debt, poor exit options, or exploitation. While all these factors matter, they obscure a deeper political question: what makes long-term staying not merely possible, but functional? Why do individuals invest their entire productive lives in a country that offers no route to citizenship or long-term security, and where legal status can evaporate simply with the end of a contract?

This article argues that the answer lies not in individuals’ failure to leave, but in state-engineered ‘logic’ of permanence. Migrant longevity in Dubai is not an administrative oversight nor a humanitarian contradiction. It is an outcome, and possibly even a strategic asset. Through a combination of economic containment, legal paralysis, and what this analysis refers to as ‘the governance of hope’, the UAE has engineered an ecosystem that leverages the long-term presence of migrant to meet its political and economic objectives while avoiding the ‘social costs’ of integration. The result is a workforce that stays long enough to build the city, but never long enough to belong to its community. This “architecture of temporary labour is designed to be renewable, not transformative” (HRW, Migrant Worker Abuses in the UAE, 2023). Dubai thus operates a system of “permanent temporariness”: a model where migrants are indispensable to the economy yet structurally non-citizens and politically marginalized. This article will dissect how this counter-intuitive equilibrium, held together by mutually reinforcing economic, legal and psychological forces, is sustained and why it functions.

Part 1: The Economic Logic

While permanence was historically rare within Dubai’s migration regime, it is now an embedded feature of its economic architecture. To understand why workers, remain for extended periods, it is essential to first analyze the financial mechanisms that shape their decisions. These economic factors often dictate choices long before legal or political considerations become relevant.

a)     Debt and a Moving Target Economy

Most low-wage migrants arrive in Dubai already in the negative. Recruitment fees, which are legally prohibited but widely documented, can amount to several months or even a year’s salary. In Naufal’s widely cited study of migrant workers in Dubai (2009), 78% of newly arrived workers reported borrowing money to secure employment, often at high interest rates from informal lenders. Debt thus acts not merely as a financial burden but as an anchor: it determines how long one must remain before leaving becomes even conceivable.[Ui1] 

Economists refer to this phenomenon as a ‘moving target economy”, where financial goals shift faster than workers can achieve them. A worker may plan a two-year stay, only to find the original savings target has drifted out of reach, forcing a corresponding extension of their timeline.

This persistence is rooted not just in exploitation(though often present), but in a systematic economic deferral; a structure in which, as stated by an interviewed South Asian worker, “There is always one more reason to stay.” (UNCDF, 2022). Each financial success, such as covering debt repayment into savings, or sending remittances to cover major family costs (school fees, medical bills, dowry contributions, home construction, etc.) inherently creates the impetus for the next financial goal. The brilliance of this arrangement, from the state’s perspective, is that longer stays stabilize the labour supply through extended residency while simultaneously ensuring workers do not gain substantial political claims. This system guarantees a reliable yet un-rooted workforce, providing the economic foundation of permanent temporariness.

b) The Institutionalization of a Remittance Economy

The UAE’s remittance ecosystem[Ui2] , one of the largest per capita worldwide, is often presented as a positive outcome of high employment. However, it is better understood as a defining feature of a remittance economy, in which migrant workers earn wages in the host state but are expected to send most of their income abroad rather than settle or invest locally. With outward remittances exceeding AED 170 billion annually (AED 183 billion in 2024 alone according to the Central Bank) these flows do more than transfer money; they fulfil multiple political functions for the state.

First, remittance flows operate as an indirect subsidy for domestic consumption in South Asia and East Africa, binding sending states into asymmetric economic relationships that incentivize political alignment with the UAE. By underpinning household incomes and macroeconomic stability, these flows raise the political cost of diplomatic rupture. Second, remittances entrench labour corridors that translate this dependence into concrete diplomatic leverage. This dynamic is most visible in bilateral labour negotiations, where sending states such as India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Bangladesh routinely weigh rights-based demands against the risk of restricted access to Gulf labour markets and the remittance income they generate.

But the UAE benefits in more subtle ways, too. Beyond diplomacy, financial infrastructure (such as prepaid wage cards, bank-mandated remittance channels, the Wage Protection System etc.) creates a state-regulated transnational economy. This system keeps migrants’ financial destinies tightly bound to the UAE, ensuring they contribute to the country while remaining socially and politically marginal.

This is where the ‘social cost’ point becomes clearer. Long-term migrant workers sustain the economy without requiring the forms of integration such as housing, language policy, welfare and political voice that long-term residents would usually demand elsewhere. Their children are not citizens; their pensions are not state funded; their political grievances do not accumulate into electoral pressure. Longevity without integration is therefore not an accident, but a cost-efficient equilibrium.Thus, debt cycles and remittance infrastructures create a paradox of mutual dependance: workers stay because of financial obligations, and the state benefits from their enforced permanence. The economic treadmill continues, stepping off becoming more dangerous the longer one runs.

Part 2: Legal Containment and the Architecture of Informal Governance

If the economic logic explains why many migrants need to stay, the legal and political framework explains how this presence unfolds exactly as the state prefers: extended and renewable, but never transformative. Dubai’s migration regime is fundamentally designed not to integrate individuals into a national community, but rather to manage their usefulness whilst pacifying their political presence.

a) Visa Dependency as a Form of Containment

The central pillar of this containment system is the kafala (sponsorship) framework: a legal structure that ties a worker’s residency to a specific employer. Although heavily criticised, kafala remains the skeleton of the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) labour model. While the UAE has introduced reforms – such as Law No. 33/2021 on labour relations, domestic-worker legislation, and new job-mobility channels - these adjustments have left its core logic of dependency intact.

This dependency operates through immobility by design. Workers require employer approval to change jobs, and losing [Ui1] a job can mean losing legal status, leading to daily compounding fines for overstaying. The contsatnt threat of falling ‘out of status’ serves as a political choke point, disciplining behaviour through the ever-present fear of administrative disappearance. A system capable of reclassifying someone as illegal simply through bureaucratic inaction is a system of sovereign silence, which enables control without overt confrontation.

This is where the paradox reveals its strategic edge: by keeping migrants “temporary,” through strategic bureaucracy, the state balances economic expansion with national-identity protection. Migrants sustain the economy but don’t dissolve into it. A NBER study on worker mobility notes, “restricted exit functions as a substitute for citizenship rights in migrant-dependent economies” (Naidu et al., 2014). In other words: permanence becomes possible, but belonging, crucially, does not.[Ui2] 

b) Depoliticisation and the State’s Demographic Sovereignty

Formal political integration through naturalisation, voting, or long-term settlement is structurally absent. Citizenship in the UAE is not a path, but a status termed as a national-security matter. Functionally, this framework ensures that long-term residence does not translate into political entitlement. This is why,[Ui3]  despite decades of contribution, long-term migrants do not gain the social or political leverage that duration confers in most states. Time in Dubai does not translate to claim. Depoliticization thus functions as both a shield and instrument.[Ui4]  It operates as a shield by preventing labour-based political mobilization that could challenge regime authority in a demographically asymmetric state. It is an instrument because it allows the state to determine who enters, who exits and who remains only temporarily, ensuring that labour serves economic objectives without acquiring political stakes or claims to inclusion. Politically, the restriction of citizenship preserves regime stability by maintaining a clear boundary between a small citizenry endowed with rights and a large migrant population defined by revocable presence. Demographic sovereignty, in this context, is not about physically excluding foreigners (Dubai welcomes millions) but about controlling the temporality of their presence, and thus, their agency.

c) Informal Governance: Camps, Churches and Networks

What makes this system remarkably stable is that the state does not manage migrant life directly; it manages its boundaries. Within these defined limits, informal self-governance naturally emerges.

Sites labour[Ui5]  camps, ethnic churches, WhatsApp job groups, and rotating savings associations (known as tandas or committees) become centres of social order, incurring minimal cost for the state. They are tolerated because they perform vital political work: they channel grievances inward rather than upward. Ethnographic research by Matt Reber on migrant housing in Dubai describes these spaces as “densely communal, self-regulating, and emotionally sustaining,” even when material conditions are cramped (Reber, 2021). The result is a remarkable form of low-cost stability. Low turnover keeps the labour market predictable, community support cushions hardship, and grievances remain localised -- discussed in shared rooms, not public space.

This localization is reflected in the Gulf’s broader political landscape, where civic mobilisation among migrant workers in GCC states remains strikingly low despite substantial abuses. The International Trade Union Confederation, for instance, reported that migrant-led strikes remain “sporadic, rapidly suppressed, and rarely coordinated across worksites” (ITUC, 2022). The issue is not the absence of migrant grievances, but the system’s ability to absorb them before they can be articulated politically.

This is the quiet social contract: endurance in exchange for continuity, and order in exchange for silence. Because this order requires virtually no state mainteenance cost, it becomes an essential pillar of long-term migrant permanence.

Part 3: The Governance of Hope

If legal containment explains the cumulated conditions leading migrants to remain in the UAE, the psychology of aspiration then explains why they continue to endure it[Ui1] . Dubai has mastered something few states manage at scale: the ability to convert individual ambition into a stabilising political resource.[Ui2] 

a) The Branding of Opportunity

Dubai’s global branding machine - the skyscrapers, the investment zones, the Expo rhetoric of “The Future is Here” - is not merely aimed at tourists or investors. It also shapes the cognitive landscape in which migrants make sense of their own sacrifices. The city markets itself as a place where hard work ‘pays off,’ even if the structural conditions ensuring it rarely allow workers to advance beyond marginal increments. This is what anthropologist Neha Vora calls the “aesthetic of possibility”: the visual and narrative cues that allow migrants to imagine themselves as future success stories, even when statistical mobility remains minimal.

Beyond the city’s luxurious façade, , the socio-economic gap between low-wage migrants and the city’s elite is vast.Dubai, however, strategically externalises its wealth in a way that makes aspirations feel proximate.The constant exposure to wealth creates specific psychological tension: an inequality that feels tantalising, rather than alienating. Success seems just out of reach -- often the perfect distance to keep people striving.

b) Hope as a Political Buffer

Political theorists sometimes describe this phenomenon as ‘temporal governance’: ruling not by dictating the present, but by shaping expectations of the future. When migrants believe that “next year will be better,” grievances diffuse horizontally rather than vertically.

This is where hope becomes a political buffer. It delays disappointment, defers accountability, and most importantly, creates time for the system to reproduce itself. The hope at play is not irrational -- workers do often see small, incremental improvements in salary or job conditions. They may shift employers, take on side gigs, or pursue modest promotions from labourer to supervisor. These micro-advancements fuel belief in the possibility of macro-change, even if the larger political structure remains fixed.

c) The Mirage of Integration

The UAE does not promise citizenship to low-wage migrants – however, it does not explicitly foreclose aspiration either. This ambiguity is deliberate. The introduction schemes like Golden Visa programme, while primarily benefitinginvestors, professionals, and the wealthy, produces a halo effect. This makes the concept of long-term legal security possible, even though it remains realistically unavailable to most. Psychologically, this is very powerful: a system issuing an outright ‘never’ provokes resistance, whereas a system that says not for you but perhaps someday, in another form encourages compliance. Dubai positions itself precisely in this ambiguous zone, where migrants know the rule, but also the exceptions to it. This ambiguity is a form of strategic softening, keeping the horizon open just enough to prevent disillusionment from turning political. One Nepali construction worker interviewed in a 2021 ILO survey captured this sentiment:
“Maybe not me, but maybe my children could stay one day. That is enough to work harder now.”

Ambition therefore becomes self-regulating. The very desire of “making it” generates the compliance that renders migrants simultaneously politically quiet and economically indispensable.

d) The Emotional Cost of Leaving

Hope can also reconfigure the deeper meaning of returning home: the act is not merely a departure but an emotional and symbolic admission that their dream failed to materialise. For workers who have sacrificed years away from families, endured debt, and lived in cramped dormitories, the decision to go back signifies a ‘failure’ that is far more emotionally burdensome than the simple act of booking a ticket.

In interviews conducted by the UNCDF (2022), many long-term migrants described leaving not as liberation but as “unfinished business.” When the future is left intentionally open-ended, the present becomes bearable enough to continue. This is the psychological core of permanent temporariness: leaving feels like defeat, whereas staying becomes a possibility.

Part 4: Geopolitical and Strategic Relevance

If migrant permanence sustains Dubai’s domestic economy, it also radiates outward, shaping the UAE’s geopolitical influence. Migrants are not only workers; they are vectors of financial flows and structual diplomatic leverage. Their staying patterns form the backbone of a regional strategy that extends beyond labour markets.

a) Labour Corridors as Foreign Policy Infrastructure

The UAE’s largest migrant-sending partners (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Nepal, Kenya, and Ethiopia) are not incidental. They represent long-standing labour corridors that have become quasi-diplomatic infrastructures in themselves.

These relationships are politically valuable. Remittances that flow from Dubai to Kerala or to Punjab generate economic stability in sending regions, which, in turn, makes governments more willing to accommodate the UAE’s political and commercial preferences. Bilateral agreements on labour protections are framed as negotiations, but really often operate within asymmetrical power relations. As LSE Middle East Centre researcher Amr Elsayed notes in a 2024 analysis of Gulf diversification, “labour dependency is a two-way vulnerability… but one in which the Gulf states exercise far greater control.”

Migrants thus become a source of political leverage. Sending governments, with millions of their citizens employed in the UAE, are highly unlikely to risk diplomatic confrontation. This is because the consequences could destabilise their own domestic economies reliant on remittances. Such dynamic gives the UAE significant bargaining power across areas including trade, investment, and even regional security cooperation.

b) Stability as Soft Power

One of the UAE’s most effective exports is the image of stability, projecting itself as a predictable, technocratic, and efficient state. Migrant permanence is central to this narrative, by ensuring that economic growth is shielded from the labour volatility often seen  in other rapidly developing states. The underlying calculus is simple: a workforce that renews itself without political assertion creates the appearance of smooth continuity.

For the UAE, stability is not merely a domestic achievement; it is a foreign policy asset.
It underpins the country’s ability to host global events, from COP28 to major financial summits, bolstering its branding as a ‘safe hub’ in a turbulent region. The result is a model of authoritarian efficiency that many states, especially in Africa and Asia, reference admiringly, even as they overlook the structural inequalities that sustain it.

c) Remittances as a Form of Transnational Governance

Remittances are cmore than economic exchanges between migrants and their families; in the UAE’s they also function as a form of transnational governance. Because migrants' families remain abroad, their affective loyalties are anchored elsewhere, even as their economic productivity is extracted within the UAE. This creates a structural incentive not to demand political inclusion within Dubai but to maintain stability in both locations. These continuous financial flows create a global footprint that ties multiple national economies directly into the UAE’s sphere of influence.

d) The Paradox of Managed Dependence

Here lies the strategic paradox: the UAE has no interest in dismantling its dependence on migrant labour; rather, its interest is in the latter’s management. While total reliance is politically risky and total replacement would be economically ruinous,the solution is what scholars define as “managed dependence”. This is a model where the state continuously diversifies its labour sources without changing the fundamental structure of the underlying system.

This diversification is now framed as part of the UAE’s “post-oil” vision. However, even the shift toward high-tech sectors requires migrant labour, from engineers in Dubai Internet City to nurses in municipal hospitals. Furthermore, the sustained presence s of low-wage workers allows the state to redirect national attention and political capital toward other priority sectors.

Consequently, while not an explicit promise, permanence, remains structurally accomodated.The UAE’s geopolitical status is built on the predictable nature of its labour force – a population that stays for the long term, yet without ever truly settling.

Conclusion : Staying Is The System

The core insight into Dubai’s migrant regime is that staying is not a deviation from the system – it is the system. The endurance of migrants is not a byproduct of legal loopholes or economic friction but the very mechanism that holds the model. Dubai has achieved what o many states attempt but only a few manage: the stable separation of duration and belonging. Migrants can spend ten, fifteen, twenty years in the country without becoming political stakeholders or feeling that their immense sacrifice was wasted. This is not accidental; it is a profound form of governance.

The key to this is not coercion but alignment.Migrants stay because the city offers income, order, and the chance to improve the lives of people they care about. Employers benefit from a labour force that is experienced yet not politically rooted. The state maintains demographic flexibility without the societal tensions that mass naturalisation would entail.The system works because each actor profits from this continuity, even if gains differ.

This stability defies the usual binaries used to describe Gulf migration, such asexploitation vs. Opportunity or choice vs Constraint. Dubai has in fact forged a third category one that modern Western migration theory struggles to explain: an endurance without integration. This is precisely what makes Dubai important to study. It offers a glimpse of a migration future that other global cities: high-mobility economies where people circulate for extended periods, contribute deeply, and build substantial lives outside traditional citizenship pathways. To to assert that migrants ‘stay, on purpose’ is not to romanticise the sacrifices but   to recognise the underlying logic:  people remain because Dubai offers  increasingly scarce certainties -- safety, order, income, and the persistent hope, that tomorrow will be better.

Permanence in Dubai is therefore neither an aberration nor an accident. It is the deliberate outcome of a system that successfully balances opportunity with control. Quietly and efficiently, migrant endurance becomesone of the city’s most effective engines of continuity.

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