This chapter explains why a growing number of people across the globe experience precarious citizenship--they cannot gain access to secure and permanent legal statuses for protracted periods. Ambiguous and temporary legal statuses are spreading because they represent a strategic government response to avoid resolving dilemmas about citizenship (especially questions about the incorporation of minorities, refugees, or labor migrants) by postponing those decisions, perhaps indefinitely. Moreover, the very processes of boundary-enforcement (biometric IDs and deportations) have pulled more people into the documentary power of the state without providing them a secure place within it. Four categories are discussed: 1) individuals who cannot obtain national identity documents and become stateless; 2) individuals who may have identity documents but lack residency authorization and become ‘illegal’; and a spectrum of groups with temporary statuses that are neither stateless nor fully unauthorized, including (3) temporary humanitarian protection or (4) temporary labor statuses.
This article examines the main institutional developments that have accompanied the economic and political changes in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the past twenty years. In particular, the different agencies of the UAE's Ministry of Interior have taken active roles in responding to the demographic changes and in developing preemptive policing strategies that include community policing, extensive surveillance networks, and increasingly individualized and standardized forms of identification. The paper assesses how that institutional growth has shaped the way the UAE has come to manage its guest worker program over time. It explains how the security apparatus is deployed by the state for managing the criminal and cultural impact of expatriates on the national body politic.
One would think that, after years of fieldwork and writing, I would be able to answer a pretty simple and straightforward question about who exactly I interviewed for my study of citizenship boundaries in the UAE: “Do you have any notion of the proportions [of interlocuters] of the different ethnic or descent lines that you spoke to?” This essay is about why it is so difficult to answer this question and the insights into citizenship that unfolded as I searched for an empirical answer. Spoiler alert: Answers to questions about “national” or “ethnic” origin are entirely dependent upon how we count—and miscount—time.
While most boundary-making studies examine native-born citizens’ opposition to immigration, this article explains why immigrants develop anti-immigrant attitudes. Under what conditions do previous generations of immigrants develop solidarity with newcomers? When might immigrants, instead, police national boundaries and oppose further immigration or naturalization? I argue that under uncertain citizenship status, long-term immigrants are unlikely to develop solidarity with newcomers, despite common experience with exclusionary citizenship policies. Drawing on interviews with naturalization applicants in the United Arab Emirates, this article analyses how policies that unevenly distribute rights and protections to non-citizens structure relationships between immigrant groups. Moving beyond citizen/non-citizen binaries, it calls attention to hierarchies among non-citizens, examining how long-term immigrants with partial and conditional rights police national boundaries to navigate exclusionary policies. When states restrict citizenship, making it a scarce good, immigrants may respond to uncertainty by competing and, thus, limiting access to that good for newcomers. When naturalization is arduous, applicants face pressures to continually perform citizenship to prove that they deserve inclusion. Naturalization applicants lacked citizenship, but they immigrated to the UAE before the establishment of its guest-worker program and claimed Emirati identity by differentiating themselves from “migrant workers.” I show how migration enforcement and boundary-policing factored into their perceptions and performances of what it meant to be a “good” Emirati citizen. Ethnic hierarchies and the timing of migration created distinctions between immigrants eligible for naturalization and those who were not. The mere possibility of inclusion in the citizenry may generate hierarchies between immigrants, precluding solidarity, and encouraging boundary-policing.
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