Building Nations with Non-Nationals

By Ivan Szelenyi

Ivan Szelenyi was the Foundation Dean of Social Sciences at NYUAD in 2010–2014 and during his tenure there he carried out a study of Pakistani guest workers who had worked in the United Arab Emirates and were about to take up a job in this country. About 90 percent of the population of the UAE are guest workers (about half of this population is from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh). The critical research question for the study was: is it sustainable to build a nation with 90 percent who are not-nationals and have no legal channels to become citizens of the country where they spend occasionally a substantial part of their life? Can people from different ethno-sectarian background merge into a well functioning society? Given labor shortages in Europe and North America and extraordinary pressure to migrate to these countries these questions do have relevance well beyond the Gulf Monarchies.

Ivan Szelenyi is Max Weber Emeritus Professor of Social Sciences, NYUAD and William Graham Sumner Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Political Science, Yale University. He is a Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Ordinary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Corvina Kiadó
• Release date: Feb 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9789631364804

Book preview

Ivan Szelenyi

in collaboration with

RIAZ HASSAN and VLADISLAV MAKSIMOV

BUILDING NATIONS

WITH NON-NATIONALS

The exclusionary immigration regimes of the Gulf Monarchies

with a case study of Pakistani return migrants

from and prospective migrants to the United Arab Emirates

CORVINA

Copyright © Ivan Szelenyi, 2019

On the cover: Pakistani guest workers in Abu Dhabi, UAE

Photo by Nikolai Kozak, 2014

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information-storage or -retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Published in Hungary in 2019 by Corvina Books Ltd.

1086 Budapest, Dankó utca 4–8.

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ISBN 978 963 13 6480 4

Electronic version

eKönyv Magyarország Kft., 2018

www.ekonyv.hu

Electronic book: Ambrose Montanus

Acknowledgements

In the spring of 2010 Ron Robin, at that time Vice-Provost at NYU at the advice of Dalton Conley, at that time Dean of Social Sciences at NYU approached me whether I would be interested to take a job at NYUAD. Initially the idea was I would create a Center for Social Research, much like one which operates out of Ann Arbor and start social research in the Middle East. Eventually it turned out funding was not available for this ambitious plan, so Ron asked whether I would be interested to be the Dean of Social Sciences (one of the four foundation Deans of a newly funded research university within the global university system of NYU).

Conley’s recommendation was the most unusual one. I moved to Yale in 1999 as the chair of the Sociology Department with the charge to rebuild the department – at that time reduced to two tenured faculty members. Dalton was a starting Assistant Professor of great promise – I admired his wonderful dissertation book and was astonished that at that young age already wrote a genuinely interesting autobiography. He was without any doubt the best junior faculty at Yale and the only one who had a realistic chance to get a tenured position among the competent, but – given the almost impossible hurdles Yale put out to granting tenure at that time – not quite sufficiently junior faculty.

Craig Calhoun who had a similar charge at NYU what I had at Yale – namely to rebuild a not particularly distinguished operation – was smart, went after Dalton and offered him – just one or two years out of graduate school – a tenured position at NYU. Dalton of course asked me to reciprocate. I knew, as a new department chair at Yale, I just cannot do this, so I denied tenure to Dalton. What a noble man, that years later he recruited me to NYU, which was a university fast improving. I am grateful to Dalton for inventing this difficult, but fascinating opportunity for me and putting me on the road leading to this book.

To cut the long story short I decided to end my academic life with a last adventure and for various reasons to leave my conformable job at Yale – where I held a named chair – for a newly founded institution – at that time exclusively a liberal art college. Ron was persuasive and put together a package for me, which was in terms of salary and especially of discretionary research support what I just could not turn down. This research fund enabled me to carry on research while occupying a time-demanding administrative position. I am grateful for Ron Robin to invent this package and Vice Chancellor Al Bloom and Provost Fabio Piano for approving it. Without this fund, the research this book reports on would have been impossible.

The idea to do some research on guest workers while in Abu Dhabi occurred to me early, in fact already during my job interview at NYU. This was the most unusual job interview I can recall. My impression was that my colleagues in Sociology quite liked my work, but their message was clear: you are nuts to take this job. Especially Richard Sennett (and less forcefully but also some other colleagues) alerted me to the questionable – to put it mildly – labor history of the UAE. I did listen and did hear them. While I never did any work before on labor or migration after just glancing at the guest worker situation in this country I decided I will take the job and just move into this rich – though for me unknown – field. I remember calling Richard after a few weeks and telling him what my research will be. I do not think he believed this can be done, but my appointment was approved, and I want to express my thanks to Richard for bringing the guest labor issue to my attention.

Upon arrival to Abu Dhabi I had the opportunity to bring for the first year a Hungarian colleague, János Ladányi with whom I was planning to write a book on ethno-racial classification. This book – seven years later – is still in progress. Nevertheless, it was János who gave me the first impulse to find a handle what at least one of the research questions of the study should be. As we were walking after sunset the small side streets in downtown Abu Dhabi he kept alerting me: how strange there is no apparent conflict – and absolutely no violence – on streets jammed with young South Asian men of various sectarian and ethnic background. At home they kill each other, how comes they get along here so well? – János kept asking. Indeed, we have not seen any police on the streets, just Indian, Pakistani a Bangladeshi men, mostly in their twenties, chatting with each other… This indeed was a good point to start. Are they just afraid of the – visibly not present – police, or living in a multi-cultural, multi-religious society they began to tolerate or even respect each other? I am grateful to János to channel my attention in this direction – become a sort of Godfather of this research – and I am sorry I could not persuade him to join me in the resulting project.

During the first year of my tenure at NYUAD we had nobody to teach Islamic society so I persuaded the administration to give me a visiting position to invite a professor to do this job. I was fortunate to persuade the distinguished scholar of Islamic society, Riaz Hassan to join us in Abu Dhabi. Riaz, of Pakistani descent, was vitally important for me to feel confident enough to start doing empirical work on Pakistani guest workers (I did not know the culture, history or any of the languages), he helped me to develop the research design and after failed attempts to do field research on guest workers in UAE, at his advice we moved our site of field research to Pakistan itself. His contributions to this project and the book cannot sufficiently be appreciated, hence I listed him on the title page as one of my main collaborators.

Riaz put me in touch with the Institute of Social Sciences in Lahore and the wonderful couple who run the Institute: Rafiq and Razia Jaffer. They carried out the fieldwork for us and offered to Riaz and me their warm hospitality during our trips to Lahore. Rafiq and Razia: thanks!

There were also quite a few students at NYUAD who became interested in guest workers, or specifically in this project. I am particularly grateful to Vladislav Maksimov, who spent two full months in Budapest and helped me with quantitative analysis. He is therefore also listed – next to Riaz Hassan – as a collaborator on the front page. I also learned a great deal from other students, especially from Nicole Lopez, who did intriguing work on Philippine maids in Abu Dhabi, in a shelter administered by the consulate of the Philippines; from Marc Hoffman who did a small, but impressive ethnographic work on prostitution on Hamdan Street; and last, but not least from Alex Wang who did extensive and outstanding field work on a labor camp.

My thanks are due to Zoltán Fábián and Blanka Szeitle, from TARKI, who worked as research assistants for me on the quantitative analysis.

I am also grateful to Vanilia, who given her busy artistic schedule in New Haven could not join me in Abu Dhabi (with a rather desert like artistic scene), but with one short visit to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and the wonderful times we spent together when work called me – several times a year – to New York made my rather lonely life in the Gulf bearable. As all long-distance relationship, we had our ups and downs, but as I am completing this manuscript during the early Summer is 2017 – this time in Budapest – she is sitting next to me and the book would not be done without her encouragement and love. So this book is dedicated to Pakistani guest workers and to Vanilia.

May 20, 2017

Introduction

The Gulf Monarchies rich in oil, flooded with financial resources and scarce in labor introduced a historically unique immigration regime. To retain the ethnic, cultural, religious identity of the shrinking native population, they opted for a radically guest-worker type of system. They admit immigrants only on temporary visa if they have sponsors (this is the so called kafala system), but they never obtain permanent residency permits and will never qualify for citizenship.

In the most extreme cases of this regime the native population with citizenship rights may shrink to 10%. In all Gulf Monarchies, typically about half of the resident population is coming from South Asia, primarily from India, followed by Pakistan and then Bangladesh.

I lived for four years in Abu Dhabi, UAE, as the Dean of Social Sciences of the newly funded NYU Abu Dhabi and it was inevitable for a sociologist working on questions of social inequality, class and race to become interested in guest workers and eventually I decided to conduct a study on them. Riaz Hassan, a distinguished scholar of Islam of Pakistani descent became also interested, he helped me develop the research project, and with his help I found the Pakistani research center which carried out field research for us in Pakistan. With Riaz we soon figured it out: it was next to impossible to do empirical research in the UAE, so the only way to study migrants systematically was after they returned home, and given Riaz’ background Pakistan was the obvious site to select.

The aim of this introduction merely is to present a chapter-by chapter outline of the book.

In Chapter 1 (Immigration regimes: The various ways how the relationships between native/nationals and migrants/guest workers are institutionalized) we give an overview of various immigration regimes. The main purpose is to identify what is unique and possibly historically unprecedented in the immigration policies of the Gulf Monarchies and especially in the United Arab Emirates. Together with Riaz we developed a typology of such regimes based on varying relationships between natives and non-natives. We identified four such regimes:

Exclusion of natives in an immigrant non-native population, which will constitute a nation in the modern sense of the term (white colonies): Regimes of exclusion of natives;

Nations can be constituted by people born in the territory of the nation state: Jus Soli. But one often interprets the nation by descendent either in cultural-linguistic and/or ethno-religious terms: Jus Sanguine. Countries operating with such principles of Jus Soli or Jus Sanguine often (sometimes?) create inclusionary mechanism to incorporate immigrants into the nation by some system of naturalization. It is often assumed that naturalized migrants have to lose their citizenship in their country of origins. These are: Inclusionary immigration regimes;

Trans-nationalist migration regimes when multiple citizenships – which may imply multiple naturalized citizenship – and even multiple residences are permitted: Regimes of multiple inclusions;

The Gulf Monarchies are nations which are constituted only by natives, descendent of people who lived in the national territory already at a predetermined time. Non-nationals are admitted only temporarily with no promises, institutions of procedures to ever grant them citizenship. It is anticipated that such migrants – guest workers – (and even their children born in the Gulf Monarchies) will return to their home country once their services are not needed any longer: we call these regimes of exclusion of immigrants.

In Chapter 2 (Nation building with non-nationals. An empirical case study of Pakistani guest workers just returning or intending to go to the UAE) we take one case study from the Gulf, the United Arab Emirates. Next to Qatar the UAE is the most extreme case of nation building with temporary guest workers by a shrinking minority of natives.

The Pirate Coast was constituted by demographically stagnant, very poor emirates with constant warfare with each other which on the other hand were open to quantitatively insignificant but socially often important immigration from neighboring countries including India and Persia. The discovery and eventual exploitation of oil wealth created a need for demographic expansion and import of unskilled and skilled labor. In 1971 seven emirates created the UAE. The birth of this new nation had to resolve the problems how to merge various tribal identities from the various Emirates into a common Emirati identity and retain such an Emirati identity at a time of massive influx of typically non-Arabic, overwhelmingly not native Arabic speaker. Many of them were South Asian and often