The Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC] region is the largest regional destination for temporary migrant workers across the Global South. Yet, despite over a half-century of temporary cross-border mobility and expansive bilateral and multilateral migration diplomacy engagements, GCC states have not become a major source of knowledge production on labor migration. In fact, researchers face a long-standing paucity of information on demographic, statistical, as well as legal and policy data on GCC labor migration. In this paper, we seek to understand how, and why, GCC states control knowledge production on migration. We draw on evidence from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, including semi-structured interviews (N=20) with diverse stakeholders (state officials, GCC migration specialists, and international organization experts) as well as printed primary and secondary sources in Arabic and English. We identify a three-pronged strategy that GCC states have adopted to control knowledge production on labor migration, targeting the politics of terminology, the availability of information, and the financing of state and sub-state institutions. We rely on Foucauldian understandings of knowledge as operating through power networks in order to analyze how tight controls over knowledge production on cross-border mobility is not merely linked to GCC states’ securitization of labor migration; rather, it becomes part and parcel of a region-wide process of ensuring regime survival. Our paper marks a first attempt at linking labor migration and knowledge production in Middle East politics, as we seek to uncover the workings of the power/knowledge nexus in shaping labor migration across the GCC states.