Beyond “Eurokafala”: A globally connected approach to entry, settlement, and citizenship

Recent immigration reforms in the UK and across Europe have generated renewed commentary on the conditional nature of contemporary settlement regimes. In this context, some commentators have invoked the idea of “Eurokafala” to suggest that liberal democracies are drifting toward systems associated with the Gulf’s employer-sponsored, temporary migration regimes. This essay argues that such framings, while rhetorically striking, are analytically misleading and politically consoling. By suggesting that Europe is becoming more like the Gulf, the Eurokafala frame dehistoricises Europe’s long-standing reliance on conditional inclusion, employer sponsorship, and restricted access to social rights and settlement, while casting the Gulf as an analytically external site of illiberal migration governance. The analysis is informed by ongoing research on visa and citizenship regimes in the Gulf, alongside historically grounded engagement with immigration governance in the UK.

Drawing on examples from both contexts, the essay advances a relational, globally connected analysis of migration regimes that foregrounds shared logics of valuation, selectivity, and differential access to long term security. It shows how wealth and skills increasingly mediate access to long-term residency and social protection across regions, while citizenship itself offers diminishing guarantees of stability. Rather than asking whether Europe is becoming more like the Gulf, the essay examines what the rise of earned settlement reveals about the hollowing out of citizenship under contemporary capitalism.

Policy Recommendations

• Centre immigration status within mainstream social and labour policy design, requiring welfare, housing, and employment reforms to assess impacts across differentiated migration statuses rather than assuming either citizenship or exclusion as the norm.
• Increase visibility around the relationship between fiscal and immigration policy, with stronger policy debate and advocacy informed by clear evidence on revenue raised through visa fees and surcharges, how these funds are allocated, and their distributive effects across different groups.
• Develop migration policy through a relational framework, accounting for how UK settlement rules interact with other key migration contexts, including Gulf residency regimes, in shaping mobility patterns, skill flows, and long-term settlement decisions.

Photo by Mathias Reding