While there is a significant and voluminous literature on the rigid and hierarchical structure of migration sponsorship in the Gulf (kafala) and how it determines migrant experiences, scholars have paid far less attention to how migrant identities are fluid and contingent upon geographical location, interactions with other Gulf residents, and a range of other factors that make migrants not pre-determined but rather always in a process of becoming. In this paper, we explore our experiences as both American and non-white anthropological field researchers in the Gulf as a means to illuminate our roles in the structural and material conditions and meanings of migration in the contemporary Gulf. How do differently situated actors experience the position of temporary residence and contract work in the region, and how does this shift as they move through Gulf cities and interact with various other residents? In what ways does the category of migrant homogenize diverse gendered, national, class, and embodied experiences? Reflecting on our own positionalities as employed researchers in Dubai and Doha—we are both US citizens of color—we utilize our own experiences of discrimination, privilege, and misrecognition to explore how we were categorized in relation to local Gulf notions of belonging and outsiderness, how we ourselves participated in categorizing others, and—most importantly—how our identities were not fixed but negotiated and interpellated in relation to the spaces we occupied, our insider/outsider belonging in existing diasporic communities, and our privileged positions as American citizens and researchers. How can the position of the foreign anthropologist, especially the anthropologist who traverses various boundaries of identity, be a fruitful site for the critical analysis if the anthropology of migration? We argue that reflexive accounts by Gulf scholars can reveal how scholars themselves play a role in the production of the notion of migration (and of migrants) as an object of knowledge, and that in interrogating the scholar-as-migrant, anthropology of migration in the Gulf could potentially problematize Western categories that still underpin our understandings of contemporary life in the region.