Critics in the US have attributed academic precarity within Gulf branch campuses to illiberal and authoritarian states and their non-transparent and uneven treatment of foreigners. In my research in Education City, Qatar, I found that actors within the branch campuses reinforced these ideas by suggesting the Qatari state had the ultimate authority over employment. In this paper, I explore how these narratives obscured the logics that animated the American university’s neoliberal and imperial motivations. Home campuses operated as corporate entities in the Gulf, engaged in limited liability agreements with the Qatar Foundation. But their agreements clearly outlined that the American university, through its branch campus, was directly responsible for the everyday management of all faculty and staff, including their termination; it was also responsible for setting curricula, admitting students, and community outreach. As with most business partnerships in the Gulf, the non-citizen owner of the American branch campus was the on-the-ground kafeel (sponsor) that produced the conditions of precarity and exploitation, often for compatriots, that direct state sponsorship would likely have prevented or at least dampened, according to the very migrant rights activists who criticize projects like Education City and NYU Abu Dhabi. Treating migrant labor as a category that did not include all of the employees of Education City allowed branch campuses to take a problem endemic to all levels of the academy and pass it off as the product of a supposedly illiberal state. With operating costs, consulting fees, and incentives coming directly from Qatar Foundation, branch campuses could have ensured much better working conditions and job security across the board. There are however profits to be gained for them in not doing so, ones that resonate quite well with home campus systems, such as the growth in adjunct labor, the reliance on international student tuition, and longstanding entanglements between the academy, the state, the private sector, and imperial interests.