6 ideas
Multigenerational Indian residents of Dubai are born, schooled, and employed there yet can never naturalise, because residency depends on renewable visas tied to an employer or sponsor. They are therefore structurally temporary however long they stay. Their belonging is real in everyday life but legally unrecognisable, and this gap is what makes them 'impossible citizens.'
With the political route to membership closed, middle-class Indians claim Dubai through consumption, entrepreneurship, and their role in building the city's economy. They present themselves as the people who made the place. The neoliberal state welcomes this market-based belonging because it generates economic value without creating any obligation to extend rights.
Citizenship can be read as a bundle of separable elements: legal status, rights, economic participation, cultural claim, and emotional attachment. These are distributed unevenly across both citizens and non-citizens. Viewed this way, non-citizens hold some elements of citizenship while formal citizens lack others, and the citizen/foreigner line stops explaining who actually belongs.
Emiratis are a small minority in their own country, so their status is secured through welfare entitlements and ethnic-genealogical exclusivity rather than through democratic participation. They feel culturally besieged by the foreign majority. The resulting insecurity drives the state to harden exclusion of long-term residents, which means citizen and non-citizen precarity produce each other.
Middle-class Indians secure their own respectability by separating themselves from South Asian manual labourers, whom both they and the state treat as the truly disposable migrants. They reproduce the host society's hierarchies of nationality, class, and race. By sorting 'good' residents from 'bad' ones, they participate in the very exclusions that keep them from becoming citizens.
Indians in Dubai are often assumed to be homeland-oriented sojourners. In practice, their 'Indianness' is produced locally through Dubai's neighbourhoods like Bur Dubai, schools, markets, and nationality-based sorting of residents. The diaspora's identity is therefore a product of the host state's governance and urban space, not a transplanted copy of the homeland.