Retirement as a new frontier of temporary migration governance: Financialisation and later life in the UAE

Retirement is emerging as a new frontier of migration governance in temporary migration regimes. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where over 90 percent of residents are non-citizens, residency has long been tied to employment, making retirement synonymous with return to the country of origin. Recent golden and retirement visas partially reconfigure this model by allowing residents who meet financial thresholds linked to assets, investments and passive income to remain after retirement. These visas link retirement to efforts to diversify carbon-based economies by expanding real estate, health and eldercare, and financial services. This article conceptualises this process as financialised denizenship, a mode of governance in which non-citizens' long-term security is mediated through their financial capacity rather than their economic and social attachments in places they've lived and worked. Drawing on English-language newspapers in the UAE, the article shows how retirement reforms recast non-citizens' insecurity from a question of citizenship and permanency into one of financial preparedness, producing new hierarchies of inclusion in later life. By extending financialisation to populations excluded from citizenship, the UAE case reveals how temporary migration governance is being reorganised around financial inclusion, while pointing to a global trajectory in which restrictive immigration regimes and financial markets increasingly mediate later-life security.