Temporary protection regimes have become increasingly prevalent as an interim response to humanitarian crises. Studies of temporary protection policies often focus on how temporary legal statuses produce uncertainties in the lives of status beneficiaries. Less attention is paid to the ways that temporary protection policies shape host country institutions, such that both beneficiaries and co-nationals with other legal statuses are affected. This paper analyzes the case of Turkey, which has extended temporary protection to over 3.6 million Syrians since 2014. While most Syrians have temporary protection statuses, a sizeable number of healthcare professionals have, by this point, received citizenship. Their livelihoods are nonetheless shaped by a politics of temporariness: legal healthcare jobs are tied to limited humanitarian projects and equivalency processes end in consular bureaucratic impasses due to tensions between Turkey and Syria. How have Syrian health professionals sought to stabilize their lives and livelihoods in a policy context of temporariness? Drawing on 60 interviews with Syrian health professionals in Istanbul conducted between 2017 and 2022, this paper examines how Syrian doctors and dentists attempt to mitigate the continuing uncertainties perpetuated by the Turkish state’s ambivalent policies toward Syrians. It finds that doctors are caught between legal stability through the formalization of work and economic stability through informal but relatively lucrative work. In order to attain legal stability, doctors have two options: they can take on low-paid, high workload jobs in EU-funded Migrant Health Centers or they can apply for equivalency, though they can only progress to the level of general practitioner. In contrast, in order to attain economic stability, doctors often work informally as specialists. They attempt to legitimize this informal work by situating themselves as critical providers at both a local and a global scale. They provide care not just to Syrians, but also to other Arabic-speaking refugees and migrants who live in the city, as well as Arabic-speaking medical tourists. The paper argues that when stability through formal legal pathways are circumscribed—even for citizens—immigrants attempt to stabilize their livelihoods through appeals to alternative legitimating logics. In this case, the persistent market niche for Arabic-language care becomes a source of legitimation. The paper shows how migrants who attain citizenship can nevertheless be affected by temporary migration policies. It also demonstrates how participation in local and global economic markets can provide an alternate path of (partial) stabilization when state legal options fall short.