2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(2) rights. 20 While the costs of bringing, and potentially deporting, the migrant workers are externalised from the state to the private sector (companies, individual citizens or in some cases non-citizens), the system is centrally administered, regulated and policed through the Ministry of Interior. 21 This leaves the migrant worker vulnerable to the whims of the sponsor and ultimately the Ministry. In addition to underlining the formal structural violence of the kafāla system, as has been largely covered in existing literature, Lori advocates for consideration to be given to the ‘complexity of the multidimensional power relations between citizens and noncitizens that the kafāla produces’. 22 Beyond seeing this only as a hierarchy of citizens over non-citizens, she points out that ‘as one kafīl [sponsor] vouches for another and one migrant vouches for another they create an added informal layer of social trust and protection against crimes like migrant abuse or theft from the kafīl’. 23 While effectively demonstrating how the signifier ‘temporary’ in fact relates more to legal status than duration of time, it would have been interesting for this chapter to perhaps bring out greater discussion of the gendered dimensions of such experiences (especially for female domestic migrant workers). Chapter 5 uses the colloquial Arabic expression ‘Taʿāl Bachir’ (Come Tomorrow) 24 to further explore the politics of deferral and policies intended to make naturalisation applicants wait — perhaps indefinitely. It shows how this tactic is used at all levels of the authorities, both by individual desk officers in the directorates and by high-level decision makers in the Ministry of Interior in Abu Dhabi who have the power to resolve the issues. The chapter draws on interview material with naturalisation applicants to show how the intersection of application location and ethnic origin has largely determined citizenship outcomes. As a case study, Lori focuses on the experiences of a small number of South Asian families who were resettled in the UAE in 1972 after being expelled from their homes in Uganda. Again, the Abu Dhabi–Dubai distinction is of central importance, with the separate caseloads who settled in each city at the same time having strikingly different experiences. 25 As per its historically more inclusive incorporation model, those in Dubai were initially issued identity documents (including passports) by the emirate, but these were not confirmed by the central authorities in the capital. Those in Abu Dhabi were excluded from the start. Ironically, as time has passed, these two communities have arguably undergone a reversal of fortunes. Following the clear rejection of their naturalisation cases, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees intervened to initiate resettlement to the west for the Abu Dhabi community, while those in Dubai have been relegated to temporary ‘foreign’ residents based on their having been processed for Comoros passports by the UAE government. Chapter 6 returns to the outsourcing of passports in the context of the identity regularisation drive motivated by security considerations in the mid-2000s. It highlights how the digitalisation of identification has further excluded domestic minorities from society due to the increased level of daily checks. 26 This chapter 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 ibid 135. ibid 144–45. ibid 155 (emphasis in original). ibid 157 (emphasis in original). ibid 160 (emphasis in original). ibid 167–69. ibid 222–25. 358