The Arab Uprisings had a profound impact on the domestic politics of affected states as well as regional politics. Most studies choose to focus on how these major protest movements impacted regime durability and democratization prospects, or how they transformed into civil conflict that created or protracted existing refugee crises. This paper aims to explore how these critical events affected policies governing the flow of peoples; how did the uprisings affect migration laws? How did they impact nationality and citizenship laws? In this paper, I argue that uprising outcomes are associated with migration, nationality, and citizenship policy changes, and specifically as they pertain to emigrant and extraterritorial citizen rights and responsibilities as codified in law. States where uprisings toppled incumbents or brought an overhaul of the regime also saw significant changes to their migration, nationality, and citizenship policies with broad impact. In states where regimes survived major protest, migration and nationality laws as well as legal amendments and decrees were tactfully instrumentalized to bolster regime support without changing the nature of the state-emigrant relationship. The paper employs a comparative case analysis of four states, where incumbents either lost power or survived, that experienced a sustained upheaval in the early wave of the Arab uprisings – namely Bahrain, Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia. The paper seeks to unpack how mass protests produce institutional effects transcending the spatial boundaries of the state.