Choosing Comfortable Transience in the UAE

Not all high-income countries offer pathways to citizenship — even for highly skilled or wealthy migrants. The UAE is a prime example: while naturalization remains rare, the country continues to attract and retain global talent. For many highly qualified migrants, especially from Asia and the Middle East, the UAE offers a compelling package: high living standards, personal safety, zero taxes, and proximity to their original countries and cultures. These advantages often outweigh the lack of long-term legal security, prompting some to embrace a lifestyle of 'comfortable transience' in the UAE rather than 'uncomfortable permanence' at home or in the West.

Conventional wisdom states that countries compete for high-skilled and high-net-worth migrants so much that they are willing to offer them pathways to citizenship. While this might be true for some Western nations, many wealthy countries in Asia and the Middle East take a different stance. They may offer such migrants a high standard of living, but naturalizing is often extremely difficult or even impossible. These countries therefore present an intriguing counterpoint, raising important questions about how critical access to naturalization is for high-skilled and high-net-worth individuals from developing countries.

The comforts and discomforts of the UAE

A recent study I published in Ethnic & Racial Studies asks this question in the context of the UAE, where naturalization options are largely off the table for most migrants. My co-author, Githmi Rabel, and I interviewed high-skilled Indian women living in the country to explore: How do they view stepwise migration from the UAE to a Western country with a naturalization pathway versus remaining in the UAE, where citizenship is not an option?

Our interviewees consistently highlighted the benefits of living in the UAE, including its high levels of safety, government efficiency, lack of income tax, access to affordable domestic help, high living standards, and proximity to India. Many felt that the country presented an idealized version of India, with many cultural similarities, access to Indian food and entertainment, and a strong sense of community among Indian expatriates. It helped that Indians form the single largest nationality group among foreign residents in the UAE. There are multiple cultural associations providing Indian migrants with opportunities to engage in cultural and religious activities year-round, numerous private Indian schools offering both international and Indian curricula for the children of Indian expatriates, many Indian-owned groceries, supermarket chains, hospitals, pharmacies, restaurants, and so on.

At the same time, these women also lamented the permanent impermanence of their stay in the UAE, understanding that they could lose their residency status. Even the UAE’s Golden Visa did not fully allay their concerns about their long-term future.

Stretching the present and deferring the future

Despite this sense of transience, many interviewees preferred staying in the UAE rather than returning to India or moving to the West. Going back to India was associated in their minds with a loss of the everyday luxuries and freedoms they enjoyed in the UAE, owing to the inefficiency, bureaucracy, corruption, and lack of safety they associated with their country of origin. Their imagined lives in the West were shaped by different concerns, from the burden of managing household chores in the absence of affordable domestic help, to the prospect of feeling minoritized in majority-white societies, the emotional toll of being distanced from extended families, and the fear of downward social mobility owing to significantly higher taxes.

Recognizing that their present level of comfort might be transient if they left the UAE, interviewees tried to prolong their stay as much as possible, for example, by rejecting opportunities to relocate, including to Western nations, and delaying any return to India. Some even decided not to pursue permanent residency options in the West, preferring the lifestyle advantages they currently enjoyed in the UAE. They saw tourism to Western countries as an adequate substitute for permanent migration. In other cases, they shifted their focus to their children’s futures, leaning towards a form of multi-generational stepwise migration by sending them to university in the West, thereby securing citizenship opportunities for the next generation.

These findings highlight the diverse forms of temporariness experienced by different groups of migrants. The 'comfortable transience' experienced by high-skilled and high-net-worth individuals who have relocated to the UAE is miles apart from the 'precarious transience' experienced by low-wage migrant workers, who grapple daily with insecurity and deprivation owing to their temporary visa status. Even as interviewees craved 'comfortable permanence' in the UAE via naturalization, they were willing to settle for comfortable transience over (potentially) 'uncomfortable permanence' elsewhere.

A post-West world of migration

These findings outline the contours of a post-West migration landscape, in which select high-skilled and high-net-worth migrants from the Global South recognize that there is sometimes a trade-off between material comfort and the legal security offered by naturalization in the West. For many, choosing to remain in the UAE is an act of migratory arbitrage as they attempt to extend their comfortable transience in situ for the foreseeable future, rather than engaging in either return journeys or stepwise migration.

This shift reflects a broader reordering of destination hierarchies, where alternatives to the West are becoming increasingly attractive. Crucially, the findings are less about the intrinsic appeal of transience and more about the rise of a post-West world where viable alternatives to citizenship in the West are emerging for globally mobile high-skilled migrants from the Global South.