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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Book Excerpt |
Guests in their Own Homes
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| Dubai's complex policies towards immigrant workers |
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Published : 1 December 2010 |
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STEPHANIE KUYKENDAL / CORBIS |
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| An indoor ski resort in Dubai.
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Y FRIEND WILBUR had come from New York City to visit me while I was doing research in Dubai. We went to dinner at a swank restaurant in the Madinat Jumeirah mall, a fake Arab souk complete with non-functional, traditional wind |
towers. We met up with Vishul, a thirty-something analyst who was born in India and raised in Dubai but had studied and worked in the US for almost ten years before returning. Wilbur asked Vishul where he was from, to which Vishul answered, ‘Delhi.’ ‘Delhi?’ I said, taken aback since we had known each other for a few months and this was the first I heard that he thought of himself as not from Dubai. Vishul clarified, ‘Well, Delhi, and I live in Dubai.’ Vishul’s answer – I’m from Delhi and live in Dubai – is telling in that it illustrates a basic dilemma of expatriate workers, especially those born and/or raised in Dubai, that they are legally and socially not ‘Dubaian’. They may live in Dubai, but, largely as a result of this exclusion, they usually do not consider themselves ‘of Dubai’.
Legally, as a distinct category, second-generation expatriates do not exist. Like any other expatriate, they are in Dubai on three-year, renewable residency visas; some even live and work illegally in Dubai on tourist visas. These expatriates acquire no additional rights or benefits from being born in Dubai. No matter how long they and their families have been in Dubai, there is little chance of attaining citizenship, and there is no such category as legal permanent residence. A child born in Dubai has the nationality and passport, by default, of their parents. In fact, the visa system is so strict that a child born to a national woman with an expatriate father is considered an expatriate, though a child born to a national father with an expatriate mother is a national. Dubai’s economic and social system rests upon this structural instability (or flexibility – I guess that is a matter of perspective), the fact that, no matter how long you have been in Dubai, you are treated like anyone else coming in today. You have no right to be there and you have no inalienable rights; you are there at the pleasure of the government, and they can revoke your privilege of staying there at any time.
To reinforce reinforce to expatriates how tenuous their status in Dubai is, the visa and work permit systems in Dubai, indeed in all the Gulf states, do not recognize the bonds of adult male children to their parents (women can stay on a parent’s or husband’s visa without having to get a labour permit binding them to their employer). What this means is that a boy who turns eighteen is no longer on his parent’s visa; he can be sponsored by a school, but otherwise needs to be working and on a labour permit. The legal and social limbo that second-generation expatriates in Dubai find themselves in is an unintended consequence of the ‘original sin’ of their expatriate fathers and mothers, who nearly all came for better working conditions and family living, only to raise children who do not belong in Dubai, who cannot claim to be of Dubai, and yet are socially foreigners in their countries of passport.
The Possibility Of Citizenship
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O FULLY UNDERSTAND the precarious situation of expatriates in Dubai, and the ways in which their identities and migratory behaviour are structured, we must discuss just how unlikely citizenship is, and the degrees to which people fear banishment and deportation. To stay in Dubai permanently, an expatriate must acquire citizenship. Citizenship in |
practice, though, is very difficult to acquire, even for Arab expatriates. In the past, the UAE was somewhat open to granting citizenship, mainly to Arabs (including Sudanese) and Iranians, though some Pakistanis and Indians have also received citizenship. From the time of independence in 1971 through 1997, about 50,000 people had been naturalized, roughly 8 per cent of the citizen population.1 In recent years it has been a de facto state policy in the UAE (and in the Gulf states generally) to reduce the granting of citizenship to expatriates.
Citizenship , when granted, is qualified. Naturalized citizens do not automatically become nationals – they generally do not possess nationality cards that are given to Arab families, and thus are not eligible for government benefits such as free education, land grants, housing, direct cash payments and other welfare benefits, though they do acquire UAE passports. Naturalization is contingent, and can be revoked, as can UAE passports (as one Jordanian expatriate told me how her aunt’s was confiscated).The requirements to be considered for citizenship are often thought to include thirty years’ residence, being Muslim, Arab and an Arabic speaker, and having a clean police record, ‘proper’ academic qualifications and a ‘healthy’ bank balance – though it is at the government’s discretion to give citizenship after a screening process, at which point personal influence (wasta) comes into play.
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| REUTERS / JUMANA EL HELOUEH |
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| Residents hoping to receive UAE citizenship arrive at one of the registration centres in Dubai. |
While most expatriates I asked told me some version of the above, it is unclear whether this procedure is actually codified. Even government officials seem uncertain of the policy regarding naturalization. For example, in 2005 the director of the Dubai Naturalisation and Residency Department (DNRD) announced that expatriates of any nationality living in Dubai for twenty years would be eligible to apply for passports, and, if granted, would be issued a document that would allow them to be treated as UAE nationals.3 The following day, the director retracted his statement, tersely saying about the issuance of passports, ‘such matters are beyond the purview of the DNRD’. One month later, the UAE Minister of Labour and Social Affairs proposed granting UAE citizenship to expatriates of ‘high calibre’ and ‘highly skilled professionals’ who could be key contributors to national development. The minister was quoted as saying, ‘Why don’t we avail [ourselves] of highly skilled professionals for our economy needs.We should attract them and even grant them nationality to benefit from their high qualifications.’ But in late 2007 the same minister ruled out any possibility of expatriates being awarded citizenship, no matter how long they have been in the UAE. Again, expatriates in the UAE are considered contractual workers, not immigrants. The minister’s adviser emphasized this point, saying, ‘That is the whole reason contractual labour laws are used, so workers fall under contractual law rather than immigration law.’
While I was in Dubai, I met only one person, Hasan, a businessman in his mid-thirties, who had acquired citizenship, though some of the Arab expatriates I interviewed had family or friends who had received citizenship. Hasan was naturalized in 2003, along with his entire Sunni Arab Iranian family. Like other expatriates, his life was shaped by the conditions of the three year visa, which changed when he became a citizen. He said, You know, I grew up here all this time knowing I was an expatriate. My dad never told us to prepare for citizenship, it just happened . . . I think what changed was subconscious: sense of security, a sense of living in this place and wanting to contribute to its long-term prosperity.
Hasan told me that, if he had not received citizenship, ‘I think I would’ve moved. In fact, I actually immigrated to Canada, but then I never stayed. I landed and came back.’
While there are no publicly available records, it is unlikely that many who are eligible to be considered for citizenship get it. For Hasan, wasta (influence) eventually led to the family acquiring citizenship. Even with wasta, it takes time – his father lobbied his connections for nearly ten years. Others though, while ‘qualified’, are not so fortunate. I interviewed two Arab expatriates in their mid-twenties whose fathers had both worked in government ministries for almost thirty years. These two, Zaid (a Syrian) and Hussein (an Egyptian), also work in government ministries, though at low-level positions as clerks (neither has a university degree). Both their families have had their applications for citizenship under consideration for twenty years. They both held faint hope that they would acquire citizenship anytime soon, something they both desperately wanted.
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| GHAITH ABDUL AHAD / GETTY IMAGES |
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| A worker sweeps a street in Old Dubai. Most migrant workers live without adequate rights and in difficult conditions in various labour camps across the city. |
The most commonly stated reasons given by government officials for denying citizenship, or even permanent residence, are the threats of cultural extinction and demographic imbalance posed by the possibility of absorbing so many expatriates into the pool of citizens. These twinned arguments have been repeatedly advanced over the years as the main reasons to deny expatriates any kind of permanent residency. However, there are two major factors that are critical to the government’s stance on naturalization which are left unstated, but which are central to the management of expatriates in Dubai. First, the government’s legitimacy depends to a great degree on its ability to guarantee a high standard of living to nationals. Allowing expatriates to become naturalized might lead to the state having to spread its welfare largesse among a much larger pool of recipients. Secondly, the three-year visa system provides a simple and effective mechanism of social control over expatriates. The system as it stands requires all expatriates to have a sponsor, their employer, for their visas, and is a particularly effective threat that works well to keep all levels of expatriates in line.
For the vast majority of second-generation expatriates I interviewed, citizenship is a non-issue. They accept, however grudgingly, their second-class status in Dubai. They live their lives in a place where they are always in a liminal or in-between state, where their existence is defined by a permanent condition of legal and social precariousness. And these expatriates for the most part are comfortable with this.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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BornInAUH
30 November 2010
09:57 PM
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Spot-on. I was born in Abu Dhabi and spent the first 18 years of my life there. Never felt like I truly belonged...to local Arabs you were always "the other". I never had a local Arab as a friend as I had to go to a private school attended by mostly South Asians.
I did have some Arab friends but they were from other countries. Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, Sudanese, etc. Reminiscing about those times is a little painful because even though Abu Dhabi is home I can never go back there without a visa.
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