Beyond the citizen/non-citizen divide: inter- and intra-ethnic boundary-making among South Asian migrants in Saudi Arabia

This article examines how middle-class South Asian migrants make sense of their belonging in Saudi Arabia, a country where citizenship is ethnocratic, gendered and highly restricted for migrants. Drawing on narrative interviews with first and second-generation Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis settled with their families in the Kingdom, it argues that these migrants do not subvert the ethno-national hierarchies that place them below Saudi nationals but deploy boundary-making strategies to navigate their social locations across gender, ethnicity, class and profession. While Gulf migration scholarship has foregrounded the citizen/non-citizen divide, this article shows that boundary-making operates at two connected levels. At the inter-group level, restricted citizenship and a segmented labour market sustain an enduring boundary between Saudis and migrants. At the intra-group level, middle-class South Asians draw distinctions among themselves, separating their educated and professional selves from low-wage co-ethnic workers. Shared religion is double-edged: Islam offers belonging that can cross ethnic lines yet also becomes a site of boundary-making between Saudi and South Asian ways of being Muslim. Understanding these processes through translocational positionality, the article calls for a more intersectional understanding of how migrants navigate stratification in exclusionary migration regimes.