In all of the states of the GCC (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE), foreigners constitute the vast majority of the private sector labor force and a substantial proportion of the overall population, sometimes even comprising the majority of residents. It is this demographic context that makes foreign labor a politically salient issue. I am interested in the construction of distance as a way to define citizenship in these six states. Questions about the integration or distancing of foreign laborers are especially provocative in the new spaces of globalization like Free Trade Zones, mega-construction sites and burgeoning industrial and economic "new cities." In my view, this is because local populations and governments are still struggling with the substance of rights of national citizenship in a territorial state even as new globalized spaces and actors are evolving beyond it. Labor migrants are symbolic markers of larger issues. I demonstrate that overwhelming dependence on foreign labor fosters layers of confrontations and multiple modes of distancing. I articulate seven types of each that are now evident in the Gulf. Distance and confrontation have become more pronounced due to the confluence of spiraling inflation, lower profit margins for corporations and diminishing wage differentials between home and host countries. My purpose is to systematically relate confrontation and distance back to constructs of citizenship and to compare patterns between the six countries. An analytic focus on distance and labor builds bridges between debates about citizenship and the growing research on new, globalized spaces of contestation. How foreign labor is treated is intimately related internally to ideas about gender, ethnicity and cultural security and externally, to global markets. While the oil states are integrated into the capitalist economy through oil and labor, they remain internally fragile in many ways. I demonstrate how this internal fragility plays out in distance and notions of belonging. State efforts to construct distance are not only a way to control foreigners but also to make up for the absence of political rights. The greater social and economic privilege that can be attached to "being local," the less emphasis there is on meaningful political rights as a component of citizenship, however one defines it.