During the first half of the 1970s, a coalition of pro-democracy activists, feminists, and workers in Kuwait led perhaps the most powerful movement for noncitizen rights in the history of the Persian Gulf. This paper traces the history of their movement, which forged new and potentially transformative solidarities across the boundaries of nationality. Their agenda exemplified their ideologically inclusive orientation: to create a pathway to permanent residency and naturalization; to provide nationality to the children of Kuwaiti women and noncitizen men; and to improve the lives of noncitizens, especially in the workplace. The paper demonstrates that the rights of citizens and noncitizens were inextricably intertwined. It argues that debates over citizenship and nationality shaped not just the lives of noncitizens, but the future of democracy in Kuwait. The category of class most effectively transected the exclusions of nationality. The coalition was spearheaded by the trade union movement, which understood that its power was directly proportional to the size of its membership, and its ability to incorporate Kuwait’s enormous noncitizen workforce. Workers and their allies sought to unify a fragmented and unequal set of Kuwaiti labor laws that provided special privileges to citizens, and even went on strike to defend the rights of their noncitizen comrades. They also challenged the economic arguments used to defend the systematic exploitation of noncitizen labor, noting that because employers were structurally incentivized to hire cheaper and more vulnerable noncitizen labor, improving the wages and working conditions of noncitizens could help solve a growing problem of youth unemployment. They faced opposition from a powerful coalition led by major employers and their allies, which tried to make noncitizen labor even cheaper and more available by launching state-led efforts to expand the geographical range of the labor recruitment system. In addition to being a novel contribution to the historiography of the Persian Gulf, this research overturns the narrative that xenophobia and self-interest generated mass popular support for exclusionary nationality laws, and demonstrates how citizens in the Gulf fought back against the oft-discussed exploitation of noncitizen workers. It therefore holds interest for scholars of migration, citizenship, labor, and leftist movements. The sources of this paper include memoirs, newspapers, oral history interviews, and extensive archival research, overwhelmingly in Arabic, across Kuwait, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.