Migrants and Monarchs. Regime survival, social contract, and the politics of immigration in Saudi Arabia (1991-2020)

How did Saudi Arabia keep popular upheavals at bay during the Arab Springs? How do rentier monarchies organise their survival in a context of mass immigration and deep transformations of oil economies? Migration politics offers partial but compelling answers to both questions in Saudi Arabia, one of the largest immigration countries in the World. This article first shows that from the Gulf crisis of 1991 to the Arab Springs, Saudi monarchs have turned migration as a central political issue using immigrants as scapegoats both to deter popular grievances and to advance individual power-seeking agendas, albeit maintaining mass immigration flows. Yet beyond instrumentalization by ruling elites, migration also became a new policy domain with new rules, new bureaucratic practices, power relations and identities which transform the state but consolidate the regime and the rentier state. Relying on discourse analysis, institutional history and in-depth ethnographic fieldwork within state bureaucracies, this article traces the politicisation of migration from the Gulf crisis of 1991 to the Arab Springs and describes the political mechanisms of regime survival and state transformation. Such insights from the Saudi case also shed new light on the intricate links between economy, politics and public opinion in immigration societies more generally, not only in oil-rich Gulf states, but also in the Global North.