In the following paper I address how the ‘demographic imbalance’ of the UAE has led to the emergence of parallel social contracts between the state and its citizens and the state and its non-citizens. I then examine how its naturalization policy has been used as a key mechanism for enforcing those parallel contracts by policing the demarcation between nationals and expatriates. I consider how the securitization of naturalization policy has also given the state the ability to create a ‘gray zone’ or a liminal population between these two seemingly mutually exclusive categories of nationals vs expatriates. Specifically, I discuss how it has externalized the costs of citizenship to an “offshore” site by naturalizing the paperless (bidoon) with a foreign passport, effectively placing that individual in the category of ‘expatriate’ (and hence in the secondary social contract) while the individual himself never actually moves. The individual is told that this is a temporary measure and that at some unidentified point in time, contingent upon good behavior, he/she may be brought into the pool of citizens. The person’s legal status is thus not a stagnant state of a citizen or a non-citizen; but rather part of a population that gives the state flexibility in the allocation of welfare resources by forming a cushion for absorbing economic shocks or pressures. What emerges is the regulation of Emirati citizenship not as a series of rights and responsibilities (or as the “right to have rights” (Somers 2008)), but as the “privilege to have privileges” where one’s precarious membership is defined by conforming to a particular kind of conduct; that conduct is at once cultural, moral, and political (or rather, more accurately, ‘apolitical’)—with “allegiance” playing a central role.