Citizenship is best understood by looking both at whom it embraces and whom it leaves out. Therein lies the politics of citizenship. What is interesting about the oil states of the Arabian Peninsula is that they exclude the very people on whom they depend for economic prosperity. I examine the discourse of citizenship in these states. My focus is on how ideas of citizenship bounce off those who excluded from its benefits; namely, the bidoon and documented migrant laborers. I have two objectives. I document the size and diversity of both groups. There are, conservatively, 14 million documented workers. They constitute 34% of the combined population. There are also many bidoon, an under-studied population. I carefully delineate the multiple origins of bidoon within and across states. This matters because origin directly affects their status vis a vis citizens. Second, I examine the debates on citizenship and highlight three parts of the politics of citizenship: cultural insecurity, population management and prospects for naturalization. Perceptions of cultural insecurity are fostered by dependence. There is a growing sense of the marginalization of citizens within their own land. The perception of cultural threat is expressed through myriad new regulations and social antipathies toward noncitizens. The flip side of this is a plethora of efforts to educate locals about the meaning of their national culture. There is finally recognition that decades-old indigenization policies have failed. The question then becomes one of population management. How will these states reduce friction yet maintain control over workers? There is significant international pressure to reform the conditions of work and residency, and more specifically, to regularize the status of the bidoon. I examine pressure points, issues of contention and policy innovations. Finally, citizenship passes through blood and naturalization is extraordinarily difficult to attain. There is heated debate about relaxing the restrictions on it. I compare the rules on naturalization across states. For certain categories of bidoon, there are many gradations along the way to being granted the rights of citizenship. Local populations and governments are still struggling with the substance of rights of national citizenship in an old-fashioned territorial state even as new globalized spaces and actors are evolving beyond it. Just as there are hybrid forms of power and authority beyond states and markets, so too, there may be hybrid forms of citizenship and membership that take form and content in the demographic imbalance of the Arab Gulf.