“We are workers, not protesters”. This is how Sudanese male migrants in Beirut would often reason not joining the popular protests that began in Lebanon in fall 2019. Yet while they position themselves as workers in this way, they face a particular predicament; as undocumented migrant workers, they are excluded in both legal and discursive terms from the category of ‘worker’ in popular Lebanese imaginary. As part of the underbelly of Lebanon’s vast service economy sustained through cheap foreign labor from East Africa and South Asia, Sudanese men are the unrecognized working class of Lebanon. They have been living and laboring as cooks, drivers, butlers and doormen in Beirut for decades; their service keeping the well-to-do in comfort through hard times. Now they are the first to feel the current crisis in Lebanon as the service sector is cutting jobs and salaries by the hour. The current crisis has thus cemented their status as exploited and disposable labor, as they face detention and deportation if they strike and protest alongside their Lebanese colleagues; a structural exclusion that has largely gone unnoticed in the protests celebrating Lebanese cross-class unity. At the same time, Sudanese migrants continue to build communities of kin, memory and attachment in Beirut. Based on fieldwork with Sudanese migrant families in Beirut, this paper explores how migrants’ ability to live on in Beirut amid crises past and present challenges the very discourses and structures that serve to exclude them. In conversation with scholarship that explores how migrants remap state and regional territories as they move through and habitate within them, this paper argues that the sustained presence of the Sudanese migrant worker, as a black African, Arabic-speaking subject, confronts familiar frames of belonging both within the Lebanese city-as-nation and in a regional framework. How might we study ongoing histories of labor class struggles in a Middle Eastern context that follows the perspective of the migrant, not as a minority experience but as the prototype subject of labor and revolt? In a Middle East economy heavily reliant on labor migration, the average worker does not translate easily onto codes of ‘Arab’ identity. The Sudanese migrant trail provides a living archive of transregional connectivity and geopolitical dynamics that calls for a reconsideration of Blackness and belonging in the Middle East.