Neoliberal migration states in the Gulf: High-skilled migrants, domestic socio-legal reforms and the centralized migration management in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates

How and why do host states manage to attract and retain high-skilled migration in the Global South? Despite extensive socio-legal reforms, less analysis has examined the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states’ shift from laissez-faire to a centralized migration management for high-skilled migration. Using the cases of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), we argue that Global South host states employ a spectrum of “hard” and “soft” domestic socio-legal reforms as structural preconditions to optimize their domestic rent-seeking and geopolitical interests. Overall, the study highlights neoliberal migration states and their rent-seeking strategies from high-skilled migration in the Global South.