The Golden Visa: Anatomy of making a long-term home in the UAE

Abstract

While traditionally governed by the ‘kafala’ system of sponsorship for non-nationals, the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have diversified their visa portfolios in the past few years, in line with rising global trends. The launch of the Golden Visa in the UAE has marked a historic shift in the way the country approaches its non-national community. Building this research on the novel aspirations-capabilities nexus within the often-overlooked lifestyle migration theoretical corpus, I unpack the short-term impact of changing residency policies on the UAE’s Golden Visa recipients – medium- and high-skilled non-nationals from various backgrounds and industries. I employ semi-structured interviews with twenty-five recipients. My research inquiry finds that, while it does not provide a structural break in the whole-of-life approach to UAE’s non-residents, the Golden Visa does, indeed, act as an enabler of its recipients’ capabilities to fulfil their long-term aspirations and (re)construct their desired life(style) in the country. Hereby, this research dampens the paucity of inquiry on the backend processes before and after obtaining the Golden Visa through the lens of lifestyle migration, making a new mark on the GCC-focused literature as well.