International labour migration to the GCC countries has primarily been understood through conventional economics, involving supply and demand in the labour market based on the maximization of returns to labour or business (Serageldin 1983). There has also been anthropologically minded-work seeing labour migration in terms of the subjective experiences of migrants, family-ties, gender issues, social networks and the like (Longva 1996). This paper, by contrast, based on fieldwork in the UAE and Kuwait, interviews with key officials, contractors, members of relevant NGOs, and migrant workers, and extensive secondary and primary research in Arabic and English, sets out to probe how far migratory labour regimes in the Gulf can be viewed as political constructions. A circular, non-citizen, menial labour force, segregated into compounds, denied rights and subject to deportation has been a way to de-politicize and control an ever-expanding working population, especially after the resistance of national workers to racial hierarchies by the 1960s (Vitalis 2007). Attempts to control labour also help account for the changing composition of the foreign workforce: the shift from increasingly resistant Arab workforces toward recruitment in Asia from the 1970s, including mass expulsions of Palestinians and Yemenis from Gulf countries in 1990-2; and, in the 2000s, responding to protests among South Asian workers, authorities in the United Arab Emirates attempted a strategy of ‘cultural diversity’, involving a turn to Arab workers once again (Shami 1994; Longva 1997; Davis 2006). Movements to ‘nationalize’ Gulf workforces are also driven in part by fears over increasingly assertive foreign labour. Sending countries have political concerns of their own. And migration is also implicated in transnational structures of power. Political exigencies, as this paper sets out to show, and not just the abstract functioning of “the market”, invade the making of the labour regime at every turn. This paper specifically argues for the significance of what Caliskan and Callon have called ‘economization’ – where numerous questions are de-politicized through their displacement into issues of demography, economic development, and technocratic expertise (Caliskan and Callon 2007). Such economization is a political technique aimed at the control of persons through the management of things. But this management often operates through (not against) the identities and essentialist interpellations. Both economization, and ‘culture wars’, therefore, are fundamental in the migration politics explored here.