When citizenship is off the table: the comfortable transience of high-skilled Indian women migrants in the UAE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Not all high-income countries offer citizenship pathways to high-skilled migrants. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), with its large skilled migrant population but practically impossible naturalization pathways, is therefore worth examining. Through in-depth interviews with 31 college-educated Indian women in the UAE, we find that the UAE’s geographical proximity to India, cultural similarity, zero taxes, and high standard of living, made interviewees reluctant to leave for the West or return to India. Instead, interviewees chose to stretch their time in the UAE and delay departure, even though this meant remaining in a state of “comfortable transience”. They did so because they worried about being unable to re-adjust to life in India, and also the possibility of downward class mobility, the loss of cheap domestic help, and racial discrimination in Western countries. For these migrants, comfortable transience in the UAE was more appealing than “uncomfortable permanence” at home or in the West.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".