By Manal Nadeem | Issue 25
The UAE is a host to the highest ratio of foreign-born residents of any country. However, the lived experiences of these immigrant communities are commonly refracted through frameworks of transience, foreclosing any talk of belonging. Most literature further scrutinises and singles out Gulf migrant governance regimes as illiberal. This essay interrogates these notions through the perspective of Dubai’s emigrant youth. It briefly examines the experiences of Dubai-born international student populations in the West, illustrating how Western migration regimes are not very dissimilar from the Gulf. Decentering macro-level analysis, this article further examines how Dubai’s youth leverage urban informality to claim their ‘right to the city’.
At the crossroads of the Gulf and the Global
Gulf migration governance regimes have often been understood exclusively through the rubric of illiberalism. Most literature focuses either on the kafala system, whereby immigrants must be sponsored by an individual kafeel (sponsor) or an employer for the duration of their stay in the country, or on employment-based visa systems subject to renewal every few years. However, this narrative perpetuates Orientalist binaries of the liberal West and the illiberal East. It suggests that Gulf migration regimes are singularly hostile, echoing “exceptionalising” discourses which single out the Gulf as exploitative.
As a student myself, I have heard extensive anecdotal evidence to challenge this narrative from many of my peers – all of them Gulf-raised – who are studying in popular Western higher education destinations. For many years, international students in the UK grappled with an unforgiving postgraduate landscape as employers remained reluctant to sponsor students, a sponsorship and employment-based system that is uncannily reminiscent of regional kafala systems. While the UK initiated so-called ‘Graduate Visas’ in July 2021 which allowed students to seek unsponsored employment for a period ranging from two to three years, the common sentiment amongst many of the international students I spoke to is that securing employment and postgraduate funding remains punishingly difficult as UK employers and academic institutions alike prefer the decreased cost and time of recruiting local students. This condemns international students to a liminal existence caught in legal crosshairs.
Indeed, this phenomenon of international student precarity is described as “middling migration”. Middling migration describes the class contradictions of international students – often hailing from middle and upper-class families – who arrive in international student destinations only to confront an uncertain existence of oddball jobs, insecure housing, and economic uncertainty. The purpose of this analysis is less to exonerate any particular migration governance regime, but rather to ask how impermanence and precarity–often uniquely ascribed to Gulf migration regimes–are, at least to some degree, characteristic of global migration regimes everywhere. It further asks how immigration everywhere, not simply in the Gulf, is a kind of contractual and transactional existence of economic exchange whereby residence is contingent on various forms of sponsorship and/or employment.
Impermanence and informality
Most urban literature on Dubai focuses on so-called ‘Brand Dubai’ – on the mega-scale, monumental developments, encompassing everything from luxury hotels to behemoth shopping malls and amusement parks, that are frequented by the city’s creative class or its booming tourist population. Scholars describe this brand as a form of ‘urban formality’ which refers to the select range of activities – visual, behavioural, even auditory – in a city that are sanctioned by the authorities as well as the cumulative visual effect of a city which is often curated to erase the grittiness of urban life.
This urban formality is frequently contrasted with the urban informality found in places like ‘old Dubai’, host to the city’s vast immigrant population. According to the ‘new Dubai/old Dubai’ binary, old Dubai is either an alien hinterland to be avoided or a fetishised “commodity” repackaged and reproduced for tourist consumption. However, much like their legal impermanence, the immigrants that call Dubai home are often overlooked in urban literature, their various forms of community-making and solidarity-building erased. I believe this very tension between the urban formal and informal can act as a rich resource for a sense of immigrant community.
A walk through Al Nahda confirms this. Al Nahda is an area straddling the border between Dubai and its more modest sibling, Sharjah. Initially known to house mostly South Asians, it has grown more diverse both in its ethnic and class composition in recent years. Despite its unassuming appearance, the area is animated by a vibrant sense of community. Come evening, children spill out onto the streets. They come out with bats and balls in hand, ready to play various sports ranging from football to cricket on sprawling open grounds that are haphazardly repurposed for sports. Children elsewhere huddle in frenzied conversation around the lobbies of their four to five-storey apartment buildings.
The story of Al Nahda is emblematic of many immigrant neighbourhoods across the UAE: Meena Bazaar, Satwa, Al Karama, Naif, and Deira. Together, these communities attest to longstanding intergenerational histories of migration to the UAE and exemplify a certain iconography of Gulf immigrant-hood–complete with ethnic restaurants, dressing, music, and sports. In these communities, immigrants – otherwise ephemeral ‘expats’– assert their subcultures and partake in some form of affective, if not legal, permanence. Their quality of seclusion and segregation creates a ‘backstage’ that affords inhabitants the opportunity to evade the overpowering gaze of the ‘formal, hegemonic city’. In a city where migrants are often overdefined by their labour, these places further offer some respite from the tyranny of work, functioning as what Oldenburg in 1989 memorably called ‘third places’ (places that are distinct from one’s place of work and one’s place of residence) and cultivating what Elsheshtawy in 2013 called the ‘living room of society’.
Conclusion
At the level of both states and cities, this article illuminates opportunities for challenging commonplace narratives of the illiberal and impermanent Gulf. On the macro level, this article begins to offer us comparative possibilities for understanding how all migration regimes partake in, and profit from, immigrant precarity despite official rhetoric of inclusion. It further calls for a more inclusive understanding of Dubai’s cityscape, offering an ethnographic intervention that situates streets and cities as sites of potential permanence for its otherwise ephemeral expat inhabitants.
Manal Nadeem
Born and brought up in Sharjah, UAE, and originally from Pakistan, Manal Nadeem is a fourth-year International Studies student at the American University of Sharjah. Drawing on her experiences of immigrant impermanence as a ‘local expat’ in the Gulf, she is a recent recipient of an Undergraduate Research Grant for a project titled, “Deconstructing Dichotomies: Exploring Motives of South Asian Emigration to the UAE Beyond Economics”, whose results she presented at the Gulf Research Meeting at the University of Cambridge. She has further served as a research assistant for various qualitative projects relating to South Asian migrants in the UAE.
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