Long-term Residency Rights, Citizenship Schemes and the Attraction of Talents: Transnational Presence over Generations in the Face of Investment Migration

Résumé En

For decades the Arab Gulf states have been known for their massive inflows of migrants—leading to a so-called ‘demographic imbalance’, the legal and institutional temporariness of the migrants’ presence and the nearly impossible routes to naturalisation. Yet, against the background of the rootedness of second- and third- generation migrants and the pressure exerted on the Gulf economies by the need for diversification, new schemes have emerged to attract certain types of migrants and have them settle in the long run. These schemes range from the granting of freehold property and long-term residency rights to special access to citizenship based on investments or careers and positions. They all present the shared specificity of targeting the highly skilled and wealthy expatriate population. Based on an exhaustive review of the evolving legislation in each of the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), this chapter analyses these various schemes and their underlying rationale of diversifying the competitive advantage that cheap but temporary labour represents. It also discusses their link to and conditionality upon a previous legal permanent residence, and how these new schemes are offered as a way to solve the long-posed but vexed question of a more systemic naturalisation of generations-long residents in the countries by only handpicking those recognised as ‘valuable’ to the host country. Ultimately, the analysis concludes that this trend, to be found outside the Gulf as well, reflects worldwide competition between countries with selective migratory schemes and citizenship by investment schemes to attract the individuals richly endowed with economic, financial and cultural capital—no matter their rootedness in the country—rather than regulating the presence of long-term migrants without such sought-after capital.