Ali and Cochrane  Comparative Migration Studies (2024) 12:16 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-024-00376-1 Comparative Migration Studies Open Access ORIGINAL ARTICLE Residency and citizenship in the Gulf: recent policy changes and future implications for the region Abdulaziz Ali1 and Logan Cochrane2* *Correspondence: lcochrane@hbku.edu.qa 1 2 Doha, Qatar College of Public Policy, HBKU, Doha, Qatar Abstract Citizenship and residency laws in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries developed during a similar time period, with similar influences, and as a result had common characteristics. In recent years, this has begun to change, with new pathways to permanent residency and citizenship developing in the region. This paper takes a comparative case study approach to analyzing the policy changes in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and then explores the implications thereof. Broadening the pathways for permanent residency and citizenship offers opportunities (e.g., reversing financial outflows, increasing domestic investment and savings, attracting foreign direct investment and skilled talent) while it also presents risks (e.g., contesting traditional forms of belonging and entitlement, reducing social cohesion, and creating new forms of inequalities). While new pathways have indeed emerged, these pathways are designed for specific types of people, defined by the criteria or requirements of them. The unique policies of the three countries imply unique directions for the economies, demographic transitions, and socio-political cultures of the region. Keywords: Citizenship, Residency, Migration, Policy, Middle East Introduction Migration and citizenship policies, as well as the related questions of entitlements, inclusion and belonging, in the Middle East, and specifically in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, have been contested for decades. These questions have ranged from criticisms regarding the lack of pathways to citizenship and permanent residency, the challenges of talent recruitment and retention when residency is tied to specific employment contracts and to low levels of domestic expatriate investment (and conversely high levels of financial outflows; Babar, 2014; Rahman and Al-Azm, 2023; Sater, 2014; Zweiri and Al Qawasmi, 2021). The specificity of these questions for the GCC often relate to the high level of expatriate residents living in the countries, which constitute the majority of the population in most of the GCC member states. Available research aligns with this, such as a focus on motivations and challenges of expatriates (Babar et al., 2019; Kanna, 2010; Khalaf et al., 2015; Lori, 2019). However, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar have begun to change their citizenship and residency policies, each in unique ways. This © The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.