Circumstantial Citizenship: UAE Born Syrians and Their Complex Journeys to Long-Term Security

Introduction

The quote above from Alina was in response to my question of why her family, who moved to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the 1980s, had decided to leave and seek asylum in Sweden. Despite being born and raised in the UAE Alina, like the majority of non-nationals in the UAE, was unable to obtain permanent residency or citizenship from the Emirates. Far from being an anomaly, Alina's family represents many families who have spent most of their lives in the UAE, and refer it as home, yet reside in the country under renewable, temporary visas. While their intergenerational presence may suggest that they have established de facto permanency in the UAE, as Alina explains above, a sudden change in socio-economic or political circumstances, such as the war in Syria, significantly reconfigures a sense of security in the UAE for some, and can produce an urgent desire to pursue long-term security elsewhere, including through asylum-seeking.

Based on interviews with UAE-born Syrians between 2016 and 2020 across multiple sites including Dubai, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands, this article investigates the impact of changing (geo)political circumstances in origin (or nationality) countries for migrants when they do not have secure residency in their host countries, even after decades and generations. Considering the impact of the war in Syria on the lived experiences as well as the short- and long-term plans of Syrian nationals born in the UAE, it explores their considerations about and experiences of onward migration from the UAE to acquire permanent residency and/or another passport — a remedy both for restrictions imposed by their liminal legal statuses in the UAE and for the sharply declining value of their Syrian passports.

Conceptually, this paper introduces the notion of circumstantial citizenship to account for the role of restrictive migration policies in generating long-term insecurity for migrants and their families, and compelling them to seek a secure legal status (via citizenship) elsewhere. It contributes to the conceptualization of strategic forms of citizenship by centring legal status as a key determinant in the analysis of inequality, and by investigating the motivations, volition, and pathways for citizenship acquisition among populations with a precarious immigration status in their countries of residence (see Mavroudi 2008; Harpaz and Mateos 2019). Circumstantial citizenship pays particular attention to shifting, macro level socio-economic and geopolitical conditions, such as the outbreak of a war, environmental crisis, natural disasters, or regime change in migrants’ and their descendants' countries of nationality, to better understand when, for whom, and how citizenship matters in restrictive migration contexts.

This article's main contributions are as follows. First, it adds to a body of work that examines the challenges faced by migrants with liminal legal status who are citizens of countries with on-going political instability or war (see Menjívar 2006; Mavroudi 2008; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2012; Alajmi 2017; Jamal 2017; Soudy 2017; Taylor et al. 2017; Babar et al. 2019; Lori 2019). UAE-born Syrians’ relationship to citizenship and future plans expands these debates by paying particular attention to intergenerational forms of legal insecurity in which non-nationals inherit both their parents’ citizenship and immigration statuses. I argue that the foremost value of another passport for Syrians is residential security and the option to remain in the UAE or maintain connections to it. Under such circumstances, onward journeys from the UAE are primarily an adaptive solution to protracted liminality in places of home rather than a pursuit of settlement elsewhere. This paper's analysis challenges both the perceptions of the Gulf as a transit place for migrants, and Western ideas about migration which assume that settlement in the “West” is the ultimate objective of those from the “global South.”

Second, by considering the constraints and opportunities that socio-economic status, gender, and age create for migrants with liminal statuses, this article attempts to conceptualize the onward movements for citizenship acquisition beyond the supposedly binary experiences of privileged non-Western nationals (strategic naturalizers) versus unprivileged actors (refugees and asylum-seekers). To understand what drives people living in restrictive migration contexts to seek citizenship from elsewhere, it investigates how binary categories of transit/final destinations, and permanent/temporary and forced/voluntary migration are articulated, experienced, and resisted by people who inhabit them. In so doing, it adds to a body of work on complex migration journeys (Düvell 2012; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2012; Crawley and Skleparis 2018; Erdal and Oeppen 2018; Carling and Haugen 2020; Snel, Bilgili and Staring 2020).

The argument presented here is set out in three steps. The article starts by providing an overview of citizenship and migration governance in the UAE, with a particular focus on the Syrian community. This part is followed by a conceptual debate on liminality, strategic citizenship, and complex migration journeys, which underpins discussions in subsequent sections. The first part of the analysis illustrates the consequences of war in Syria on UAE-born Syrians’ options for residential security. The second part demonstrates the disruptions to their future lives, particularly return plans for retirement or higher education in Syria. The third part explains how citizenship is desired by Syrians for both mobility and ability to return to the UAE. As more people across the world live under precarious immigration statuses, including in the “West” (see Castles 2010; Merla and Smit 2020), this paper provides significant insights into how the value and meaning of citizenship is shaped within global systems of stratification, and how these inequalities drive migration in complex ways today (Boatcă 2021; Shachar 2009).

The Politics of Migration Governance in the UAE

Non-nationals constitute nearly 90 percent of the overall population in the UAE (Lori 2019) — a unique demographic profile where citizens are a minority. A substantial number of non-nationals in the UAE originate from places with protracted political instability or war, such as Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Libya (Babar et al. 2019, 1566). Since Gulf States like the UAE are not signatories to the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention, nationals of these countries are not offered formal provisions or pathways to refugeehood (Babar 2017, 9). Instead, together with other migrant groups, they are governed through the temporary employer-led program known as kafala (Lori 2019).

The kafala system operates through renewable sponsored residency permits which are predominantly linked to employment (Babar 2014). Pathways to permanent residency and citizenship, as well as to family reunion and welfare benefits such as free education, healthcare, and pensions, are accordingly severely restricted (Akıncı 2022). That said, migrants who meet the criteria set by the UAE government for family reunification ¹ have settled in the UAE for decades and established multigenerational existences (Akıncı 2022). Today, Gulf States are home to second-, third-, and even fourth-generation non-nationals who were born in these countries yet are classified as temporary migrants (Akinci 2019; Akıncı 2022) — the case of this study's participants.

There are gendered differences in UAE immigration policy: Female children can be sponsored by their parents until they get married, and male children, until they reach the age of 25 (Abbas 2022). Children of migrants can also acquire temporary residence by enrolling in higher education or through employment (Abbas 2022). After the age of 65, non-nationals can no longer receive work visas and must leave the UAE, unless sponsored by their spouses or adult children or through investments, business, or retirement visas (Akıncı 2022). In recent years, longer-term visas and even pathways to Emirati citizenship have been introduced by the UAE, yet these schemes typically target “highly skilled” migrants, entrepreneurs, and investors (see Duncan 2020). Thus, although these new visas are popularly presented by the officials as signs of a more inclusive immigration regime in the UAE (AlJazeera 2022), the majority of migrants, including those born and raised in the UAE, remain ineligible for these schemes.

While the kafala system applies to all non-nationals, geopolitical concerns are central to migration policy-making in the Gulf and shape an inequitable application of visa and residency regulations, as well as surveillance (Thiollet 2015). For instance, the significant reduction in the number of Arab migrants in the Gulf over the past decades responds to Gulf rulers’ strategy of avoiding the formation of a politically active migrant community (Babar 2014, 3; Jamal 2015). Fears of spreading Pan-Arabist ideology and First Gulf War in 1991 are some of the turning points that led Gulf States to favor a predominantly South Asian migrant workforce and the systematic reduction of the number of Arab migrants (Chalcraft 2010; Jamal 2015; Babar 2014, 2017, 10). The 2011 Arab Spring renewed these security concerns with significant impacts to the experiences and mobilities of Arab migrants in the Gulf (Babar et al. 2019).

Since there is a lack of statistical information on migrants in the region, it is difficult to delineate the role of geopolitical factors in shaping migration patterns to and from the Gulf States among nationals of countries with political instability and conflict (Valenta and Jakobsen 2017, 39). Some of these groups, which could be categorized as refugees move to the Gulf as workers to escape conflict in origin countries while others, such as Syrians discussed in this article, witness war from a distance as Syrian nationals born in the Gulf.

A number of Gulf countries informally practice what Thiollet (2011, 113) calls “quasi-asylum policy” and offer informal provisions for migrants from “refugee-producing” countries, such as amnesty for overstaying visas and exemptions from deportation (see De Bel-Air 2015; Valenta and Jakobsen 2017, 46; The National 2018). However, these are ad-hoc interventions, often unreliable, and subject to the hosting state's foreign policy (Monroe 2020, 267).

Syrians in the UAE

Syrians have historically constituted one of the largest populations of Arab migrants in Gulf States (Babar 2017, 7), but their migration trajectories vary historically and occupationally (Valenta and Jakobsen 2017). The majority arrived in the Gulf before the start of the war in Syria (Valenta and Jakobsen 2017, 45). As early as the 1950s and 1960s, Syrians worked in the Gulf in high-waged professions as judges, teachers, engineers, bankers, doctors, entrepreneurs, and businessmen (Babar 2017). In the 1970s, they were also increasingly visible in lower-paying jobs, working in administrative and technical posts in the army, ports, municipality, and local banks (Babar 2017). During the first Gulf War, Syrians, due to their support for the anti-Iraq coalition, were not affected by the ripple effects of the war and their numbers in the Gulf continued to increase (Babar 2017, 10).

The UAE government, in response to criticism that they offered “zero resettlement” to Syrian refugees, stated that 100,000 Syrians have entered the UAE since the war started in 2011 (De Bel-Air 2015, 10). As of 2015, an estimated 242,000 Syrians lived in the UAE (UAE Embassy, Washington; De Bel-Air 2015), and in 2016 the UAE government announced that it will welcome 15,000 Syrian refugees over the next five years (Malek 2016). The rise in the number of Syrians in the Gulf, however, “was not more rapid than the growth prior to the conflict” (Valenta and Jakobsen 2017, 52). In fact, as authorities in the UAE have been wary of the war's possible spill-over into the UAE, Syrians have been subjected to stringent and lengthy security controls, making it difficult for UAE employers to hire Syrians (De Bel-Air 2015, 10).

Since residency visas are often linked to work permits in the UAE, the difficulty of renewing or receiving work contracts have direct consequences for Syrians’ ability to earn a living or to enroll children in schools in the UAE (De Bel-Air 2015, 11). Moreover, UAE residents can only renew their visas if their passport is valid for at least six months (Tabrez 2020). However, political instability in Syria impacts Syrian authorities’ ability or desire to renew passports for nationals living abroad, including in the UAE (Surak 2020, 177). Syrian passports are also the most expensive to issue and renew globally, costing $800 (AlArabiya 2017).

There are gendered differences in the way residential (in)security is experienced by Syrians in the UAE. For instance, men who fail to pay the fee for exemption from military conscription in Syria ² are refused by Syrian authorities for passport renewals, with consequences for visa renewals in the UAE. Furthermore, at the time of this research male children of migrants born in the UAE lost their residency when they reach 18 in the UAE (Abbas 2022). While they can extend their UAE residency by enrolling in higher education or finding employment, the former is very costly for non-nationals (Vora 2013) while the latter is increasingly difficult with Syrian passports (Monroe 2020). The following section provides an overview of liminality as a legal status and discusses how this condition unfolds for different migrant groups in the Arab Gulf States.

Liminal Legality and Pursuit of Permanency in the Gulf

Liminal legal status, a condition characterized by protracted uncertainty about one's legal status, is often attributed to undocumented migrants, asylum-seekers, refugees, and stateless populations (Menjívar 2006). In the last decade, migration studies have provided a complex and non-linear understanding of liminality by illustrating the selective application of citizenship and migration policies depending on individuals’ human and economic capital, as well as their identity-related characteristics (e.g., Rajkumar et al. 2012; Banki 2013; Ruhs 2013; Ellermann 2020; Hackl 2022). As a result of these global trends that include and exclude individuals conditionally, liminality has become something experienced across legal categories as well as within the same category, thus reconfiguring the meaning of being temporary/permanent migrant or citizen/non-citizen or having secure/precarious presence (Ong 1999; Menjívar 2006; Rajkumar et al. 2012; Banki 2013; Ellermann 2020, 2469).

Gulf migration scholarship has provided significant insights into these debates by illustrating how the kafala system is experienced by migrants differently, depending on their socio-economic status (Vora 2013), gender (Khattab et al. 2020), and nationality (Babar et al. 2019). For instance, middle-class and wealthy migrants from the Global South may establish de facto permanence in the Gulf by investing in property, business, citizenship, and transnational connections (see Gardner 2010; Kanna 2011; Vora 2013). While for some of these migrants local citizenship acquisition might be irrelevant (Vora 2013) or increasingly attainable with recent reforms, low-income migrants find themselves much less flexible against time-restricted visa regimes (see Piper and Withers 2018). These “inflexible citizens” may move around cosmopolitan destinations like Dubai, Tokyo, or Singapore. Yet unlike their counterparts, they do not hold multiple passports and have limited agency to negotiate their liminal statuses in the Gulf (see Mahdavi 2014).

A protracted temporary status in the Gulf creates particular challenges for migrants who originate from politically volatile countries, even if they may be socio-economically privileged (Alajami 2017; Jamal 2017; Taylor et al. 2017; Babar et al. et al. 2019). These groups often experience “involuntary immobility” in the Gulf, as they have limited options to settle in Western countries or return to their origin countries (Babar et al. 2019). As some of these populations could be classified as refugees, if not for their temporary statuses in the Gulf (see Babar et al. 2019), they often have compelling reasons to pursue permanency and citizenship in another country through onward migration or investments (see Surak 2020). Yet, strict border regimes along with socio-economic resources constrain options for many, creating complex journeys in pursuit of citizenship that do not neatly fit into the binary categories of migration used by policymakers.

The question of why and for whom citizenship matters is predominantly studied through a binary between those who experience liminality, and are compelled to secure citizenship for the secure legal status and protection it offers (Menjívar 2006), and those who strategically pursue a second passport for the economic opportunities and global mobility it yields (Harpaz and Mateos 2019). The former scholarship often represents asylum-seekers, undocumented migrants, and stateless populations with limited or no options (Miller 2001; Kibreab 2003; Gibney 2011), while the latter focuses on privileged non-Western nationals, who typically have a variety of resources to acquire a stronger passport, including through citizenship or residence by investment programs, ancestral ties, student migration, or entrepreneurship (see Mavroudi 2008; Harpaz 2015; Harpaz and Mateos 2019; Surak 2020; Goldschläger and Orjuela 2021). However, framing people's motivation for citizenship acquisition as either strategy (implying a range of quality options) or out of coercion (indicating no viable alternatives) limits our understanding of a phenomenon with a complex nature. Similar to migration decisions, an appeal to citizenship needs to be understood as a non-linear process shaped by context-specific and temporal factors people experience (see Collins 2018; Crawley and Jones 2021 on migration journeys).

While strategic citizenship debates acknowledge the role of geopolitical concerns in shaping demand for alternative citizenship (Surak 2020) and international migration in circumventing inequalities premised on citizenship (Harpaz and Mateos 2019), such debates do not adequately reflect on how people's (changing) circumstances may define how citizenship matters and, most importantly, reconfigure one's options and alternatives to access it. This gap in the scholarship, I argue, is related to a broader disconnect between discussions of liminality, strategic citizenship, and complex migration journeys. To exemplify the dynamic interaction between a liminal legal status, geopolitical factors, and onward journeys in pursuit of citizenship, I foreground the impact of the political situation in Syria on UAE-born Syrians’ temporary legal statuses, as well as on their options for long-term security elsewhere. I consider the constraints and opportunities that socio-economic status, gender, and age create for Syrians in the UAE to better understand why and how access to citizenship might matter more in certain contexts and times and for particular groups — questions that require further attention in citizenship studies (see Bloemraad and Sheares 2017). Answering these questions is crucial to make better sense of the global systems of stratification that construct and maintain citizenship inequality, and compel people to leave places they see as home and would otherwise prefer to remain in.

Circumstantial Citizenship and Complex Pathways to Permanence

In restrictive migration regimes where migrants are “permanently deportable” (see Lori 2019), circumstances play a central role in the way migrants experience (in)security and (im)mobility (Babar et al. 2019). At a conceptual level, circumstances squarely correspond with key topics in migration studies over volition, options, and alternatives, which Erdal and Oeppen bring forward (2018). Circumstances are key in understanding the complexity of the degree of volition in migration decisions because they (re)shape people's basic needs in their particular context, as well as the range and quality of alternatives available to them if they decide not to migrate (Gibney 2011, 48; Crawley and Skleparis 2018; Erdal and Oeppen 2018, 985; Carling and Haugen 2020). Since most citizenship acquisition requires international migration, this paper foregrounds the impact of macro-level circumstances on people's volition and options to acquire another passport via onward migration. The notion of circumstantial citizenship introduced in this paper explores complex journeys that emerge for citizenship acquisition when people do not have adequate resources nor viable options for long-term security in both their countries of residence and nationality.

It is largely assumed by policymakers that voluntary migration, including migration for work, education, or family reunification, is not coerced as long as individuals choose it from a condition of “sufficiency” (Erdal and Oeppen 2018). Yet, most migrants’ experiences fall somewhere between the categorical divide of forced and voluntary migration (Erdal and Oeppen 2018). The complexities of their experiences, and their motivations for moving to another country, as well as their relationship to citizenship can only be captured by looking beyond dichotomous migration categories of forced/voluntary, permanent/temporary, and transit/final destination and by focusing on migrants’ context-specific and temporal conditions, including their attachments to place, their relationships, and future plans (see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2012; Crawley and Skleparis 2018, 55; Erdal and Oeppen 2018; Carling and Haugen 2020, 14; Snel, Bilgili and Staring 2020).

For instance, international migration may suddenly be foreclosed as an option for nationals of countries where an armed conflict emerges. Global Passport Indexes illustrate the impact of geopolitical conflict on global mobility, where Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan nationals have the least flexibility in crossing international borders (see Global Passport Index 2022). Where pathways to asylum are foreclosed or severely restricted, nationals of these countries who have adequate resources may utilize them to “voluntarily” migrate, such as through higher education, work, family unification, or citizenship investment in a third country to protect themselves from deportation to the origin country (Valenta and Jakobsen 2017, 34; Surak 2020). For those who do not have the resources or who encounter visa rejections, asylum-seeking can also emerge as an unpredicted option, as this article illustrates.

In rapidly changing circumstances, migrants may also find themselves undertaking multiple journeys, involving different countries, and switching between forced and voluntary categories. Surak's study with Middle Eastern migrants in the UAE, including Syrians, demonstrates how their investments in citizenship from Caribbean countries are used as a mean travel to Canada visa free, seek asylum, and eventually acquire Canadian passports (2020, 177). In this way, Syrians protected themselves from repatriation to their country of origin, where conflict continued, as the Carribean nation where they held citizenship emerged as a back-up plan in case their asylum applications to Canada were rejected. Other Syrians in the UAE who migrated to the United States via voluntary routes found themselves seeking asylum in neighboring Canada after realizing the difficulty of obtaining permanent residency in the United States (Valenta 2020, 12).

In addition to these multi-staged journeys, Mavroudi's study (2008: 311) illustrates how Palestinians chose to study in Greece, where student visas were relatively easy to acquire, as a pathway to permanent residency. Some of Mavroudi's participants had families in the Gulf; thus, a Greek passport was seen as a pragmatic solution to both their liminality in the Gulf and their statelessness as Palestinians. For others, remaining in the host country can be an afterthought that emerges after they migrate there as students or workers and because of a sudden socio-economic or political change in their country of origin. While some populations may become asylum-seekers in countries where they have voluntarily migrated, others may experience “overlapping” and multiple refugeehoods in host countries (see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2012, 293; Jamal 2017).

In the case of UAE-born Syrians, the war in Syria amplified a fear of long-term security in the UAE, despite having few or no connections to Syria and because of the assumed liability of their nationality, which they inherited from their parents. Their experiences inevitably differ from those of migrants who moved to the Gulf as adults, yet few studies exclusively investigate how Gulf-born non-nationals experience the ripple effects of the political situation in their nationality countries, and the ramifications of such conflicts on their relationship to citizenship, onward migration, and future plans (c.f., Jamal 2017; Soudy 2017; Taylor et al. 2017).

Most work on Gulf migrant mobilities is on labor migrants, often in lower-wage jobs (Vora 2013). These groups are typically more transient because of shorter-term work contracts, and restricted resources to family unification (Akıncı 2022). A number of studies investigate circular, multi-country, or stepwise journeys of labor migrants from the Gulf for better working conditions and permanent settlement, preferably in the “West” (Paul 2011; Parreñas et al. 2019; Valenta 2020). While these studies provide significant insights into Gulf migrants’ complex onward journeys, the idea of the Gulf as a transit place, where migrants accumulate necessary resources before moving on, overshadows the experiences of Gulf-born non-nationals, who perceive these places as their primary, if not only, home (see Ali 2011; Akinci 2019; Lori 2019; Dakkak 2022). They, too, consider moving on to acquire citizenship in the West, yet a significant number do so to have the option of returning to the Gulf, or maintaining links there, with the security and mobility these passports offer (Ali 2011; Akinci 2019; Babar et al. 2019; Surak 2020).

Circumstantial citizenship accounts for the importance and meaning of citizenship for populations who have limited or no option for naturalization in their countries of residence or birth. It investigates how binary categories of temporary/permanent or forced/voluntary migration are given meaning, and challenged, by people who inhabit them. In so doing, circumstantial citizenship provides a nuanced understanding of what drives people to seek citizenship in restrictive migration contexts and in contexts of sudden change, which both differs from and overlaps with the motivations of those seeking citizenship strategically. In this study, Syrians typically had few options for long-term security and thus engaged with complex migration journeys to secure an alternative residence, including through asylum-seeking. Moreover, unlike strategic naturalizers, elite and middle-class non-Western nationals, who primarily seek a second passport for its mobility benefits (Cook-Martín 2013; Harpaz and Mateos 2019; Surak 2020), UAE-born Syrians pursued citizenship because they did not have the option for naturalization in their birth country and because the war in Syria impacted their experiences of liminality. Securing residence elsewhere protected them from being repatriated to Syria where conflict resumed and where they did not have substantial ties. Thus, instead of perceiving citizenship acquisition as a backup plan which they may (or may not) use in the future (see Surak 2020), circumstantial citizenship refers to acquisitions that emerge out of no viable options for long-term security, often pursued with imminent necessity, and used as primary document for identification, residence and travel.

This paper argues that in a context where the option of naturalization in the country of residence is restricted or foreclosed, and where non-nationals have very limited (or no) options for long-term residential security elsewhere, journeys for citizenship acquisition are better understood as an adaptive solution, rather than a voluntary one. Whether Syrians seek permanency through “voluntary” pathways or through asylum in a third country, these journeys are undertaken as a remedy to both their liminality in the UAE and their passports’ declining value. Moving onward is less about relocation in the “West” and more about securing a pathway to citizenship that allows them to potentially “return” home or choose where to live. Thus, the foremost value of a Western passport is the long-term residential security it offers, including, if not preferably, in the UAE. While their plans can inevitably change after migration, the growing anti-immigrant nationalism and anti-Arab racism in the West draw some of them closer to the UAE (Akinci 2019). Their relationship to citizenship challenges widespread Eurocentric ideas about “transit migration” which assume Europe and North America to be the ultimate destinations for settlement for migrants from the “global South,” rendering their (temporary) residencies elsewhere as void of meaning, simply as pit-stops on route to the “West” (see Düvell 2012; Snel, Bilgili and Staring 2020; Crawley and Jones 2021).

Methods

The findings presented here result from a study of second-generation, non-Gulf Arabs born and raised in the UAE. A total of 28 participants were recruited, using a snowballing technique, and interviewed between 2016 and 2020. Interviews were conducted in English and access was enabled through my social networks in Dubai, where I have previously worked, lived, and conducted research. Twelve interviews were with Syrian nationals. The larger study's overall objective was to explore participants’ experiences of living on temporary visas and their future plans in the UAE. The experiences of Syrian nationals stood out in interviews. Participants underlined the particular challenges faced by Syrians in the context of ongoing war in Syria and repeatedly talked about Syrians they knew who had left the UAE and settled elsewhere, including through asylum-seeking.

Four out of 12 Syrian participants lived in the UAE. These four interviews were conducted in Dubai between 2015 and 2016. Through these participants, I was introduced to eight more Syrians who had left the UAE since 2011, either alone or with their families, for Sweden (2), the Netherlands (1), Germany (2), Australia (1), Canada (1), and United Kingdom (1). Interviews with these groups were predominantly conducted online, except one in Germany, which took place in person in 2019. I was also introduced to acquaintances and friends of these individuals, two families who migrated to Brazil, and two families who purchased passports from Antigua and Barbuda. However, these interviews are not included in the analysis, due to consent issues. At the time of interviews, participants were aged between 18 and 34. Excepting short-term family visits, none had spent time in Syria or visited Syria at all since the start of war in 2011.

For participants who lived in the UAE, interviews explored the meanings they ascribed to the UAE, their future plans there, and whether and to what degree their plans had been reconfigured in the context of the Syrian war. For those who had left the UAE, interviews focused on the circumstances that led them move onwards, emotional aspects of leaving, and their future plans in both their place of residence at the time and the UAE. Findings are organized on the basis of recurrent issues raised by participants, including the risk of losing residency rights in the UAE, disruption to life plans in Syria due to war, and restrictions on their global mobility.

All participants were, by definition, middle or upper-middle class, as their parents were able to meet the minimum income requirement for family reunification in the UAE (see Ali 2011). With the exception of two participants, aged 18 at the time of interviews, all were employed as skilled workers in the private sector in the UAE. Their socio-economic positions varied greatly, mainly depending on their education levels and their families’ professions. None of the families qualified as wealthy enough to acquire citizenship by investment programs, but four had adequate resources to provide private higher education to their children either in the UAE or abroad.

Considering the relatively small sample mainly focusing on Syrians who had left the UAE specifically through asylum-seeking, this study does not aim to be representative. Instead, it aims to develop its argument alongside the lived experiences of its participants analyzing complex patterns of onward migration from the UAE, as well as other Gulf States, in pursuit of a more secure legal status and a better passport. Indeed, all participants referred to either a family member or acquaintance who had left other Gulf countries, such as Qatar, for similar reasons.

War in Syria and Securitized Migration Governance: Heightened Residential Insecurity for Syrians in the UAE

Many non-nationals in the UAE and the wider Gulf spend a lifetime in these places under renewable temporary visas (Akinci 2019). Yet geopolitical concerns often result in increased security checks for nationals from warn-torn countries, impacting the processing, issuing, and renewing of work and residency permits (De Bel-Air 2015). Gender and socio-economic status are central factors shaping the ways in which legal insecurity is experienced, and navigated.

In the initial days of my research in Dubai, I met Dina who was born in the UAE to Syrian parents. She was the first Syrian participant in my research, and while much of our conversation was about her experiences growing up in the UAE and her future plans, Dina eventually raised the impact of the war on Syrians in the UAE. After having a quick, nervous look around the coffee shop, which was filled with Emiratis, she leaned forward and whispered:

There is no guarantee if you can keep your job. It is not because of what a person did or didn't do, just because if they want to protect a certain standard in the country, every now and then, they (UAE government) make people go… It is automatic security measures…

Dina demonstrated how this security-based approach to migration in the UAE did not target Syrians individually on the basis of their security records but operated with the objective of diversifying the workforce and eliminating the dominance of particular nationalities, especially those from politically unstable countries. Syrians were certainly not the only group impacted by these measures (see Jamal 2017), yet the war raging in Syria at the time of the interview heightened the anxieties of Syrians, who, in effect, could not go to Syria if they lost their UAE residency.

While wealthy Syrians in the UAE are better equipped to navigate this uncertain geopolitical terrain (see Surak 2020), Dina explained how the gendered applications of UAE migration policy created particular vulnerabilities for Syrian women, irrespective of their wealth:

My mum's friend…, her husband just passed away. Mashallah, they're like millionaires, but she cannot stay here (in the UAE) because she was a housewife. There is nothing she can do; she and her two kids had to leave. Now she's applying for refugee status in Germany You’d think even if you have a lot of money, you don't have to be like you know, a poor refugee, but she doesn't have a place to go.

At the time of the death of Dina's family friend, only male residents could sponsor their families’ residency in the UAE. The passing of the family sponsor meant that the mother and the kids had no option but to leave Dubai and reconfigure their entire lives within a few weeks. They have since acquired German citizenship, but they plan a return to Dubai where they still have family and friends. While in 2019, the rules changed to allow female UAE residents to sponsor their families provided they are employed and meet the set salary threshold (U.AE 2022), Dina's family friend would not have benefitted from this reform as she was unemployed.

Like Dina's family friends, for Alina and her family (introduced in the beginning of this article) leaving the UAE was never something they planned. In 2011, Alina's father, the only person working in their family of seven, lost his job as a gym instructor. After failed attempts to find a job with long-term security, Alina's father decided to follow in the footsteps of family friends who left the UAE in a similar situation and sought asylum in Sweden. Alina and her family left Dubai for Greece in 2014 with their Schengen visas and, from there, travelled to Sweden. Alina recalled the conversation with immigration officers in Sweden, which demonstrated Swedish authorities’ confusion when they realized that the family had arrived from the UAE, not Syria:

In Sweden, as long as you are a Syrian passport holder, you are accepted as an asylum-seeker. When we told them that we are from Dubai, they questioned us one by one and asked why we could not go back to Dubai. It was not clear to them why we didn’t have Emirati papers (passports), especially me and my brothers… They didn’t immediately give us permanent residency because they knew we could keep our residency in Dubai for six months. That is why they gave us permanent residency one day after our Dubai visa expired. They knew we could never go back.

The authorities’ reaction is not surprising, Alina told me, as the vast majority of Syrian asylum seekers arrive from Syria. The liminal legal status of non-nationals from the Gulf States adds a layer of complexity to normative understandings of the war as being confined within Syria's borders.

For others, like Hani, who was born in the UAE to Syrian parents, this complexity resulted in their asylum application being rejected. In 2017, after getting into a dispute with his employer, Hani resigned from his job as a marketing executive in Dubai. Upon struggling to find a new job, Hani decided to join his mother and two sisters in the Netherlands. His family sought asylum there in 2015, following the death of Hani's father in the UAE who was sponsoring the family's residency. Unlike Alina's family, Hani did not have a Schengen visa, which meant that he crossed to Greece by boat from Turkey. When I spoke to Hani in 2019, he was living under a temporary protection visa and was under a lot of stress:

Even though all my family is granted refugee status here, my application was rejected on the basis that I didn’t arrive from a war-torn country. They told me that their priority was Somalis, Afghanis, and Syrians, I mean those from ‘Syria – Syria’. Yes, I never lived in Syria, but my passport is Syrian. I cannot go back to the UAE, as I no longer have residency… I have no idea what to do if the court does not accept my appeal.

Hani was later granted refugee status, following a lengthy lawsuit. Yet his experience shows the prevalence of descriptive categories of forced and voluntary migration when asylum claims are assessed. The fact that both Alina and Hani's families decided to undertake these risky journeys to Europe demonstrates the level of insecurity they felt over their futures had they remained in the UAE. If they were denied asylum, the only option would be to return to Idlib, Syria, a city at the heart of the conflict which both Alina's and Hani's parents left to work in the UAE over three decades ago. It is this uncertainty regarding their residency, or in fact curtailment of it, that compelled some Syrians to leave the UAE to look for alternatives.

It is important to clarify that residential insecurity was not experienced by all Syrians in the UAE to the same level, and not all Syrians without options found themselves seeking refuge in a third country. As with all migrants, the quality of options and alternatives varied for each Syrian in the UAE, depending on their resources and identity-related characteristics — from the level of security provided by their jobs, to their socio-economic statuses, and to their gender. Thus, for some, temporary residencies were renewed with no issues, or more easily, if not prolonged indefinitely. Yet for those with limited options, as this section illustrates, onward migration became the only solution for long-term security. In particular, for Syrians born and raised in the UAE, the war in Syria and its ripple effects produced an urgency to break the generational cycle of being on temporary visas in the UAE, the place they saw as home, and to look for an alternative passport.

Disruption to Life Plans: Foreclosure of Syria as a Viable Option

The previous section illustrated how temporal constraints, deriving from the kafala system that linked temporary residencies to work contracts, caused an additional layer of residential insecurity for Syrians in the UAE. In this section, I further illustrate how, in the context of war in Syria, some Syrian families in the UAE found themselves having to reconfigure their life plans involving Syria, such as returning to Syria upon retirement or sending their children for higher education in Syria. Foreclosure of Syria as an option required most Syrians to find alternatives, whether to remain in the UAE upon retirement or to migrate for work or higher education to the West.

The story of Dina's parents illustrates the unexpected disruption the war in Syria caused to their plans of return to Syria upon retirement, common among Gulf migrants. Dina's mother was a teacher, and her father was a medical doctor. Her parents were getting ready to retire and move to Syria when the war broke out in 2011. Thanks to her father's successful business, they were able to adjust in a short time. Even so, uncertainty about their future in the UAE was an constant worry, as Dina shared:

They prepared everything there (Syria); my father had his clinic almost set up. Our house was ready, and then war happened… There is no way they are going back to Syria now… They're thinking of what to do because they've been here (UAE) for over 27 years, and my father, even though he has his own business, is not sure if they would renew his residency every two years. You can still be worried because at the end of the day they can abruptly stop renewing especially if you are, like, 70.

At the time of the interview, in 2016, Dina lived in Dubai and had a stable, well-paid job. She was married to a Palestinian with Syrian travel documents, who was born in the UAE. They were expecting their first child. While moving to Canada or Australia was always in the back of their minds, seeing the war's impact on her parents’ plans made such a move a priority. In 2017, they moved to Canada as skilled workers, and Dina's brother left for Australia to study given that his plans to attend university in Syria were no longer possible. Both Dina and her brother acquired permanent residencies. Their parents remained in the UAE, and Dina planned to return and raise her children in the UAE after receiving Canadian nationality.

Reaching the age of entry into higher education constituted another life event which was disrupted, in part, because of the on-going war in Syria. Since higher education in the UAE was only free for nationals, non-nationals born there must either opt for alternatives in their origin countries, enroll in private universities in the UAE, or travel abroad (Vora 2013). Prior to the 2011 outbreak of civil war, Syria was recognized as having one of the most advanced education systems in the region, and many Syrian families in the UAE sent their children there. This option was also cost effective in comparison to university fees in the UAE or Western countries. As the option of higher education in Syria was foreclosed after the war, families who could not afford to pay for higher education were motivated to leave the UAE for their children's future.

Khadijah's family is one such example. Khadijah, 18 at the time, had five siblings. Her mother was a housewife, born in the UAE, and her father, born in Damascus and raised in the UAE, worked in a printing press until their departure in 2017. In addition to the financial worries of sending their children to university, Khadijah's family, like Alina's, was worried about the money they had to pay for their son to be exempted from military conscription in Syria.

In 2015, Khadijah's father decided to send her brother, then aged 16, with his uncle and family to seek asylum in Sweden. Khadijah's father thought that sending him would lead to a potential family reunification in Sweden. The family applied to reunite with their son through the Swedish Embassy in the UAE and joined him in 2017. Khadijah explained the reasons that compelled them to leave:

My dad thought it was the best decision not only for my brother but for the whole family. There are so many of us that would want to go to uni[versity]… But it is so expensive here (UAE), and we can’t go to Syria. He saw many people from the UAE doing the same thing (seeking asylum in Sweden).

Although Khadijah's father had not lost his job in the UAE, the lack of future prospects for his children as well as his son's safety pushed him to seek citizenship in Sweden. Khadijah and her brother were enrolled in university at the time of the interview, and their parents worked as janitors in a school. While Khadijah was grateful for the opportunities they had in Sweden, she often reflected on the hardships they endured in their first years there, such as staying as a family in one room in the dormitory the state provided, leaving loved ones in Dubai, becoming “illiterate” overnight, and having to learn a new language. She repeatedly stated that her father would have never considered leaving the UAE had it not been for the insecurities the war had brought upon them, and hoped to return to Dubai, her home, one day.

“I Will go Back to UAE as Swedish; Then No One can Touch Me”: Security of a Western Passport

Since the start of the Syrian war in 2011, the Syrian passport has become one of the weakest in the world, which means the ability to cross international borders is highly restricted for Syrian nationals (see Global Passport Index 2022). In addition to global mobility a stronger, preferably “Western,” passport could enable a more permanent presence in the UAE and help individuals navigate its racialized workforce, as this section argues. For most participants, “the West” was perceived as a pit-stop before they eventually returned to the UAE under better terms and conditions.

Mohammad, a Syrian national born and raised in the UAE, worked as a manager in a communication consultancy firm which required frequent international work trips. Since the start of the war, he had become frustrated with the visa rejections he received which led his company to delegate his responsibilities abroad to other colleagues. In his own words, “he was being framed as a potential asylum-seeker” simply because of holding a Syrian passport. While a proud Syrian, he perceived his passport as a “curse” following the war:

In visa rejection [Schengen] letters, they tell me it is because of the political situation in my country. Syria is not my country; the UAE is! I don’t even know the national anthem of Syria. They say that my application is not genuine and that I will try and stay in Italy. Why do I have to pay for this?! I will never find any better home than Dubai, but things are not stable. I need another passport!

At the time of the interview in 2017, Mohammad was planning to move to Australia for a master's degree, spend a few years working after graduation, acquire permanent residency and return to the UAE. Thanks to his stable, well-paid job, migrating to Australia as an international student was an option. However, many of his Syrian friends, who lacked healthy bank accounts in the UAE, were being rejected for student visas to Australia and Canada. According to Mohammad, it was the lack of solid evidence that they would return to the UAE after graduation that made the authorities in Australia and Canada consider his friends “bogus students.”

Similar sentiments were shared by UAE-born students, including Syrians, when the Trump administration rolled out the “Muslim ban” in 2017. Nationals targeted by the ban, whose study plans in the United States were disrupted, reported how they had become the victims of both their passports and shifting geopolitical conditions, resulting in an imminent urge to acquire another citizenship (see the National 2018). Rejection of student visas complicates the class-nationality nexus, whereby even when the nationals of war torn countries are privileged enough to afford an international education, border regimes can severely restrict this as an option.

In addition to global mobility benefits, most Western passports are exempt from visa requirements in the UAE (Akıncı 2022) and, thus, attractive to Syrians who would like to maintain their links to the UAE. Once their residency permit was cancelled and they left the UAE, Syrians had to either apply for a tourist visa or have a valid job offer in the UAE to return (De Bel-Air 2015). However, there was no guarantee that a visit visa would be approved. Hassan, who sought asylum in Germany in 2016, shared the story of his brother whose visa was denied when the pair tried to visit their parents in the UAE. His brother has been living in Australia since 2016 and had a permanent job and residency there:

In 2019, when we wanted to make a surprise to see our parents – we didn’t see them for three years, by the way – I got a tourist visa from the UAE, but my brother's was rejected. We didn’t know how to explain to our parents… It is bizarre if you think we lived all our lives there, our families are still there, it is home, but we can’t even visit.

These experiences made many, like Hassan and his brother, reflect on the stark reality that in legal terms there was no difference between them, for whom the UAE was their only home, and someone who has never been to the UAE. The difficulty, or impossibility, of maintaining contact with their loved ones in the UAE reinforced feelings of resentment. Together with the time required to acquire citizenship in a third country, it made people like Hassan's brother consider settling in Australia, even after being granted Australian citizenship.

For the majority of participants in this study, however, although lack of citizenship status in the UAE was the main reason they left, or considered doing so, they expressed a strong desire to return to the UAE with the better conditions their new passports offered. As Alina explained:

My dad says, once you’ve lived in Dubai, you can’t live anywhere else in the world. It is home after all… Even my four-year-old brother starts crying when he sees Burj Khalifa on TV… He says, take your passport [Swedish] and go to Dubai. I will look for a job there after I finish university. I am now half Swedish with my residency. When I get the passport, I will be fully Swedish. The woman in immigration told me this [laughs]. So I will go back to Dubai as a European; then no one can talk to me [laughs].

Her sentiments regarding “European-ness” as a currency to navigate the racialized labor market in Dubai were echoed in Mavroudi's research with Palestinians in Greece who also had families in the UAE (2008, 22). Thus, in addition to the residential security, it was the status symbol and material benefits a European passport offered in the UAE that made it appealing to UAE-born Syrians. In addition to their social embeddedness and emotional attachments to the UAE, most Muslim Syrians (and other Muslim Arabs) had a socio-cultural embeddedness in Dubai given the relative cultural proximity they felt to Emirati citizens. Coupled with growing anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments in the West, these factors made them want to return and live in the UAE once they have acquired Western citizenship (see Akinci 2019). These sentiments and future plans can inevitably change after migration, and some may settle in the countries they moved to, yet participants’ current narratives challenge the Eurocentric idea of transit migration whereby only Western countries are deemed desirable for settlement (see Duvell 2012).

Conclusion

This paper has sought to answer a key question across migration studies: Why do people leave places they are strongly attached to? By examining the reasons UAE-born and raised Syrians considered or experienced moving to a Western country, I have sought to provide a more nuanced answer to this question. Foregrounding the impact of the war in Syria, I argue that in those cases where the option for citizenship acquisition is foreclosed in places people see as home or would like to make home, and when limited (or no) options for residential security elsewhere exist, onward journeys emerge as a solution that many feel compelled to choose. What they are choosing (at least initially) is not permanent settlement, but citizenship in specific countries as a means of enabling to choose where to live, including the option to return to those same places they left.

By analyzing the extent of the impact of citizenship exclusion in the UAE, this paper contributed to a body of work that investigates strategic acquisition, use, and understandings of citizenship (Harpaz and Mateos 2019). As an epicenter of international migration and economic power, the Gulf region is key to understanding shifting yet persistent configurations of citizenship and migration on a global scale as well as citizenship-based inequalities in the Global South. UAE passports, offered to a minority of the population, are among the strongest globally (see Global Passport Index 2022). With the recent introductions of longer-term (golden) visas in the UAE, and even pathways to citizenship, this region is likely to reconfigure volition, options, and alternatives in citizenship acquisition at a global level. To that end, this paper makes the following suggestions for future research.

First, this paper argues for a need to center legal status, more specifically a precarious immigration status, as a salient determinant of citizenship-based inequalities and a driver of complex international migration journeys. Instead of reading the experiences of Syrians in the UAE as an exceptional case, this paper invites us to situate this case within a global shift towards selective migration and citizenship policies that generates new and complex stratifications. As a secure legal status will increasingly become a privilege for those able to prove their “deservingness” of settlement and citizenship, either on the basis of their wealth, skills or “cultural desirability,” these systems will likely amplify legal insecurity for many, compelling them to look for alternatives elsewhere. When legal status is studied along with other constituents of power such as nationality, skill, class, gender, and race, we can better understand complex reasons and pathways for citizenship, whether it is through investment, education, work, family unification, or asylum-seeking.

Second, this article stresses the importance of focusing on (changing) circumstances in analyzing why citizenship matters. To understand the importance of citizenship for populations with precarious immigration statuses, we have to move beyond the binaries of extant migration categories, and investigate how these categories are conceptualized, experienced, and resisted by people who inhabit them. When approached as categories of practice, we realize that the meanings of migration categories are incredibly context-dependent, and that a significant number of people are classified under categories that do not match their lived experiences. Further straddling these categories is important to understand why populations, who are classified as temporary migrants, might want to remain in, or return to, their (temporary) residences. Whether it is international students on temporary visas, skilled workers with visas tied to employment, people waiting in limbo for the outcome of their asylum application, or undocumented and stateless populations who live across decades and generations in a state that does not recognize them, not having a secure residency status where people have strong emotional ties and support systems is a central factor that compels some to look for solutions elsewhere.