This article discerns an emerging migratory disposition among the ‘second-generation’ in Western Europe. Born and raised as European citizens in countries like France, Belgium, and The Netherlands, some of the Maghrebi offspring of traditional migrant ‘guest workers’ from North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) now appear to aspire and engage in a renewed outward migration. This is especially the case for tertiary-educated males and females who seek upward social mobility but feel curbed in their efforts by a series of racial stigma in the labor market and European society at large. Based on long-term fieldwork in Dubai, this ethnography focuses on the ways in which these formerly abjected Maghrebi-Muslim minority publics from Europe reshape a sense of ‘home’ in the Arab Gulf, challenging thereby Dubai’s common theorization as an ‘impermanent city’ or a mere ‘transit state’. Not only do I detail how my interlocutors entertain a sort of ‘permanence in temporality’, their longer-term settlement intentions also put to question much of the mainstream literature on ‘integration’ precisely because, for them, holding citizenship did not correlate with a sense of inclusion, neither in Europe nor in the UAE. For many of these (highly) skilled workers, Dubai functions as a fragile yet emancipatory and canopy-like space in which previous racial stigma are suspended, if not suddenly inverted. For instance, the appropriation of the social status of ‘expat’ allows them to ‘become European/white’, thus allowing for a more liminal field of race blending and playful social identification (European, Arab, Muslim) to take shape. In trying to make sense of a series of celebratory narratives about Dubai – as a ‘cosmopolitan city’, a ‘home in diversity’, a ‘safe heaven’, or as a site of ‘professional development’, as my informants would say – I further develop a reading of cosmopolitanism that is based primarily on daily experiences of favourable (class) positionality in social space, which stands in stark contrast to an ever-narrowing social imagination in Europe. Ultimately, this paper seeks to unsettle Europe-as-center in global epistemologies on migration and inclusion by focusing on the Arab Gulf region, complicate the literature on exclusion and segregation in Dubai by highlighting unstudied ‘inclusionary assemblages’ on site, and draw attention to the hybrid agency of upwardly mobile minorities who skillfully draw on various subject positions in navigating the UAE’s complex privilege regime. In doing so, it demonstrates how, they too, co-shape Dubai’s increasingly diverse outlook as an emerging global city.