During the middle of the twentieth century, unprecedented demand for labor in the Persian Gulf reshaped patterns of movement that had long crisscrossed the Indian Ocean world. This new wave of migration came just as the region’s burgeoning nation-states sought to consolidate territorial control and unify the shattered sovereignties of a British imperial system built on intermediaries and collaboration. By the 1960s, the layered and fluctuating identifiers of tribe, religion, and place of birth had been superseded by the flattening category of legal citizenship, which bureaucratized indigeneity and excised an army of migrant workers from the body politic. National identity and state institutions in the Persian Gulf are usually framed as top-down impositions forged by imperial officials and local elites. This paper, however, examines how these transformations were shaped by a sustained wave of protest that swept across the Gulf, challenging the exclusionist paradigm of the nation and building cross-class and multinational coalitions. Protests in one country sparked unrest in others, as intra-Gulf migration brought workers and ideas into contact with one another. Nasserism, Arab nationalism, socialism, and communism refashioned Gulf politics from the 1930s to the 1960s, while strikes—and the responses they triggered— were crucial to shaping both the coercive apparatus that came to dominate Gulf states and the legal and social definitions of citizenship and foreignness. This paper uses documents drawn primarily from the British Archives to investigate the formation of formal and informal institutions in Kuwait. Kuwait is the ideal case study, as its protracted debate over “who is Kuwaiti” was complicated by the crucial role of Palestinians in the early oil years, the still-unresolved question of the bidoon, or people without nationality, and the narrative of the 1920 Battle of Jahra, which is often mobilized as an emblem of Kuwaiti independence. While the Kuwaiti Nationality Law of 1948, Private Sector Law of 1964, and new visa requirements imposed in 1969 have received some attention, the paper argues that legal measures responded to anxieties around wider issues of labor, foreignness, and indigeneity. While it focuses on Kuwait, the paper complicates the binary between “sending” and “receiving” countries by highlighting the importance of intra-Gulf migration, particularly from the areas that would become Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Thus, the paper reexamines state formation as a contested process in which issues of labor were pivotal to the formation of nation, class, and citizenship in the Persian Gulf.