In an effort to nationalize workforces, diversify away from finite oil and natural gas wealth, and reduce reliance on migrant labor, many Gulf states have invested millions of dollars over the last few years in producing indigenous “knowledge economies.” This form of economic development is manifested most visibly in the burgeoning institutions of higher learning in countries like Qatar, whose state-sponsored Qatar Foundation supports Education City, a compound that includes branch campuses of several prominent US universities. The paradox at the heart of this new knowledge economy is that, while its ultimate goal is Qatarization, it is underpinned by investment in the production of “global” citizens through a specifically American-style educational system: secular education, English-language instruction, co-educational classrooms, and faculty recruited mainly from North America. Thus this investment in “local” knowledge economy has also produced an ethno-national rubric of expertise, in which the labor required for transmitting higher education to Qatari citizens is predominantly North American. This paper explores, through ethnographic data collected between 2010 and 2012 at branch campuses in Education City, the negotiations and understandings of global and local that go into the production of Qatar’s new “knowledge economy.” In particular, I argue that while labor camps are often seen as the quintessential manifestation of migration patterns and social stratification in the Gulf, they cannot alone inform us of what migration, globalization, and localization mean in these places. In fact, new “expert camps,” as forms of both institutional and individual migration, are expressions of the ethnonational rubrics of employment and transnationalism that define the contemporary Gulf States and can inform us about the on-the-ground dynamics of national identity, belonging, class, social stratification, and citizenship, and how these are both reified and contested within emerging spaces of globalized higher education like Doha’s Education City.