In this paper, I examine citizenship and belonging in Dubai among those I argue are its most “typical” residents—the middle-class, working-class, and, to some extent, elite Indians who populate the downtown neighborhoods of the city but are mostly erased in contemporary accounts of the emirate’s rise and fall. Dubai, and particularly the downtown neighborhoods on which I focus in this paper, is predominantly South Asian, as is indexed by the linguistic, religious, sartorial, and commercial forms visible in the city, as well as by its demography—the majority of Dubai residents hail from South Asia, and of this population Indians form the largest national group. Additionally, South Asians comprise the main workforce of the private and public sectors of the city, at every level of skill set, salary, and education. They remain however, despite in some cases many uninterrupted decades and even generations of living in the Gulf, reliant on visas supplied by individual Emirati citizen-sponsors, or kafeels. Thus, naturalization and even secure permanent residency are mostly unavailable to them. Many urban anthropologists have explored how citizenship is produced through the process of moving around within the city, through everyday interactions with and within urban space—not only through a legally prescribed relationship with the state. Citizenship at the scale of urban belonging, however, is not something that is legitimized either by the Emirati state or by most scholarly accounts of belonging within Gulf cities. While their legal status places them squarely outside of the Emirati nation, my ethnographic research among Dubai’s Indian population from 2004-2011 shows that Dubai Indians are integral to the operation of governance, to national identity and citizenship, and to the functioning of Dubai’s liberalized and globalized market forms. They are, therefore, as I explore in this paper, impossible citizens.