The South Asia-Gulf corridor has one of the largest global migration flows. Yet its research often disproportionately focuses on economic disparities between sender states and petro-rich receiver states and immigration laws, positioning South Asian immigrants as rights less and rootless workers. This paper extends our understanding of South Asian migration to the UAE beyond economic frameworks through 36 in-depth interviews with generationally diverse middle-class South Asian immigrants in the UAE. Our analytic approach explores migrants’ motives at each stage of their migration journey–outward, inward, onward, return, or voluntary immobility. By disaggregating migration into discrete stages, we account for migration’s dynamic nature temporally and spatially, tracing how the salience of drivers and social, political, and economic climates varies across the migration stages. We find that middle-class migration to the UAE is increasingly influenced by worsening socio-political conditions in South Asia and the UAE’s improved immigrant retention policies. The findings also counter representations of the UAE as a transitory site enroute to “more developed” Western countries. Many immigrants prefer the UAE over the West because of its safety, social amenities, cultural and religious environment, an emerging educational sector, and proximity to South Asia, enabled by mediating factors of increasingly accommodating immigration laws and financial capacities.