The Gulf states offer citizenship to a select group of foreigners

ONE DAYGCC soon Kamal will have to leave. The Indian expat has done office jobs in Bahrain since the 1990s. They paid well enough to put his kids through school and provide a modest nest-egg. Retirement beckons. Yet he finds the prospect unsettling. It means a one-way ticket back to a place where he has not lived in decades. “I’ll leave a place with all my memories for a country I don’t recognise,” he says.Such stories are common in the Gulf. Of the 59m people who live in the six-member Gulf Co-operation Council (), about half are foreigners. Some stay for a few years; others spend entire careers. Almost all, however, arrive with the understanding that they must eventually depart.