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At a quiet intersection in Sharjah, 17-year-old Reyan scrolls through videos of Holi celebrations in India — colourful, chaotic, and unfamiliar. “I've never been to India during Holi,” he shrugs. Born and raised in the UAE, Reyan speaks fluent English and Arabic, studies at an Indian curriculum school, and is preparing for his CBSE exams. But when he turns 18 next year, he’ll face a stark question: under what legal status can he continue living in the only country he’s ever called home?

 

The UAE is home to approximately 3.5 million Indians, making them the largest expatriate community in the country. Many of these Indian residents have lived in the Emirates for decades. Their children, born and raised in the Gulf, form a quiet second generation of Indians who are UAE-bred — but not Emirati. They hold Indian passports, yet many of them have never lived in India. They are, in a legal and cultural sense, citizens of somewhere but children of nowhere.

 

The legal vacuum

 

The UAE follows jus sanguinis — citizenship by descent — meaning that children born in the country do not automatically acquire Emirati nationality. They are instead included in their parents’ residency files under dependent visas, renewable annually or bi-annually. But at age 18, boys must either be enrolled in full-time higher education (with documentation) to remain under parental sponsorship, or they must find a separate visa path — via employment or investment. Girls can remain on dependent visas as long as they are unmarried, but they too face uncertainty once they wish to pursue careers or independence.

 

According to The National, recent reforms now allow sons to be sponsored until age 25 if they’re in education, but this extension is fragile — conditional on documentation and subject to annual renewals. Without a clear path to long-term residency, many children raised in the UAE find their legal footing pulled out from under them just as they reach adulthood.

 

Raised in the Gulf, rooted in limbo

 

These children live complex lives: Indian by citizenship, Emirati by experience. Their cultural reality is shaped by mall weekends, multilingual classrooms, and a constant undercurrent of impermanence. They celebrate Diwali in high-rises overlooking desert highways, learn Arabic as a compulsory subject, and follow Indian school syllabi while absorbing Gulf norms. When families return to India — sometimes suddenly, due to job loss or visa expiry — the children often experience what sociologists call “reverse culture shock.”

 

“I felt like an outsider in my own passport country,” says Aaliya, 19, who moved to Delhi from Abu Dhabi to attend college. “Everyone expected me to blend in, but I didn’t understand the social cues. I didn’t speak fluent Hindi. I didn’t know how to ‘be Indian’ in the way everyone else did.”

 

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The academic term for such individuals is “Third Culture Kids” (TCKs) — a growing global phenomenon. TCKs are children who grow up in cultures different from their parents' native one, often leading to a fragmented sense of identity. According to a systematic review, these children exhibit strong adaptability and cross-cultural skills, but also face greater risks of anxiety and disconnection later in life due to fractured identities and lack of national belonging.

 

Why the silence?

 

Despite their numbers, these children are invisible in policy and in conversation. The UAE does not track children of expats as a separate demographic category. Indian migration discourse focuses largely on remittances and labour contributions, rarely acknowledging the complex generational fallout of long-term expatriation.

 

There is also no clear support framework in India for returnee children. Schools and colleges do not accommodate re-integration, and policies for Overseas Citizens of India (OCI) provide few tangible resources beyond legal entry. As a result, many Gulf-born Indian children find themselves caught in a slow-motion identity crisis: Indian on paper, foreign in manner, and unrooted everywhere.

 

What’s at stake

 

The issue goes deeper than paperwork. Belonging is not just about legality — it is about language, memory, familiarity, and safety. These children are often more attuned to the cultural rhythms of Dubai or Abu Dhabi than of Patna or Bengaluru. And yet, they exist under temporary permits that can be revoked at any time.

 

Migration expert and anthropologist Dr. Neha Vora, who has extensively studied Indian communities in the Gulf, notes that many children in these communities “experience their lives in the UAE as normative, not temporary. They are not immigrants with a plan to return — they are residents without rights.”

 

As the UAE moves toward long-term residency models like the Golden Visa, which caters mostly to high-income earners, the children of mid-income and working-class expatriates remain excluded. These are not just policy gaps — they are identity gaps.

 

Rethinking citizenship in the age of circulation

 

In an era of transnational mobility, the idea of citizenship as a fixed, inherited identity is beginning to fray. These children challenge the traditional boundaries of nationhood. They ask uncomfortable questions: If I was born and raised here, why don’t I belong? If I return to my country, why does it feel foreign? Their stories are not just emotional — they are emblematic of the future. As India becomes more global, and the Gulf continues to draw its workforce from South Asia, policymakers must begin to think not just about migration, but about intergenerational migration — and what that means for identity, law, and belonging.

 

By Vaidehi Jha

 

The writer is an MPA graduate from the London School of Economics and Political Science, specialising in International Development.