Qatar’s ruling elites, with their immense access to external rents and a small citizen population, have been well placed to engage extensively in distributional politics. With burgeoning funds from recent investments in a host of natural gas-related enterprises, Qatar has spent increasingly on its own citizenry over the past decade, thereby ensuring the regime’s continued legitimacy, popularity, and stability. In addition to the particular circumstances of being a high rent-earning state, Qatar reflects another mark of singularity in terms of its demography. Qatar hosts an astonishingly high number of foreign residents in proportion to its own citizens. Almost 85% of the total population of Qatar is non-national, comprising of smaller numbers of highly skilled foreigners, to very high numbers of migrant workers who populate lower skilled level jobs. Fears over the “imbalance” of nationals compared to foreigners have led to a general consensus among Qatari policymakers and social actors alike that migrants must be allowed to spend only limited periods of time within the country and have minimal rights to integration or participation. The manner in which concepts of citizenship evolve within a particular polity is intrinsically linked to the development of migration policy and governance. Citizenship and nationality laws filter out those who are not eligible, and create levels of exclusion which impact on migration governance. While the state builds citizenship around norms of inclusion, in reality the process is just as potent for creating norms of exclusion. In Qatar processes of constructing citizenship have been strongly state-derived and state-driven over the past four decades. A normative creation of national citizenship has evolved alongside a legal framework with stringent criteria of eligibility. This paper reviews the primary influences on Qatari citizenship laws, including historical and contemporary social contexts which have impacted on the development of relevant legislation. The paper argues that the evolving processes of restrictive citizenship are inexorably intertwined with existing patterns of regional migration. It further posits that the existing financial privileges of Qatari citizenship as well as the presence of a dominant non-national population have led to an ever more restrictive legal environment around access to citizenship.