Though referred to as ‘refugees’ colloquially, the overwhelming majority of displaced populations do not have the privilege of official refugee designation and permanent resettlement. As a growing trend (including in states party to the 1951 refugee convention and 1967 protocol), forcibly displaced populations persist with temporary and ad hoc legal statuses. Today the UAE and all of the GCC states are all officially non-refugee receiving states. Instead of taking this official policy at face value, this paper explains why refugees, particularly Arab refugees, came to be seen as a political and security threat in the Gulf. To understand the politicization of refugees as a process that unfolds over time, the paper examines the impact of this politicization on minority and displaced populations who were already present in the Gulf prior to the hardening of this policy. This paper focuses on a case study Asian-Ugandan refugees who were expelled by Idi Amin in 1972 and resettled in Dubai and Abu Dhabi by the Red Cross and UNHCR in 1973. Members of this population were designated as ‘special guests’ of the rulers of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, receiving invitation letters that allowed them to access to public services. This ad hoc and temporary status did not fit into what has become the binary of the UAE’s official population—citizens and guest workers. I show how it became increasingly difficult for this group of refugees to reside in this ‘gray zone’ between the official population categories as (1) the state developed its infrastructure for identity management and (2) Arab migration and naturalization became associated with security threats. The paper demonstrates how members of this population have become stateless twice in their lives—once very rapidly, when they were expelled from Uganda, and again very gradually, over the course of 40 years of residing in the UAE when their documents stopped being accepted by government agencies as valid ID documents. Their exclusion from the UAE citizenry was not due to forcible displacement—but the outcome of the gradual institutional forces of standardization, centralization, and digitization. This research is based on interviews conducted in Dubai and Abu Dhabi (2009-2011) and phone interviews (2012-2015). The interviews complement an archival analysis of 2000 documents from the private archives of a former refugee who has kept memos and letters sent between refugee groups, government agencies in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and the UNHCR office in Abu Dhabi.