Here's what you can hear about the USA.
1)Endless suburban sprawl, resulting in massive environmental destruction. Illegal immigrants heavily involved in the construction industry, leading to mass exploitation
2)Structural racism
3)Human rights on a sliding scale, with rich white rapists getting no jail sentences, and poor black people and immigrants going to jail for minor offenses.
4)Rich consumers pushing environmental and human rights issues to poor countries where people are exploited to build your $1000 phone and $250 shoe.
5)Lots of places where if you go and say "I'm an Atheist, Jesus is not God" will likely result in violence against you
6)Corrupt legal system, heavily favoring corporations and rich people
7)Absurdly hot in parts of it, Absurdly cold in other parts of it.
>I can't believe anyone would voluntarily go there, seems like hell on earth.
Lots of people probably feel that way about the USA based on the news.
UAE (Dubai, Abu Dhabi), and other countries in that region, have a lot of issues. I'll be the first to admit it having had second class status there. But I can't help but feel that a lot of Western news outlets love to bash that part of the world because it plays into how a lot of people like to feel like the rest of the world is a shithole.
Given that, I don't think I have ever read anything good about the UAE, either editorial or comments from expats. Maybe from insta influencers who wanted to pad their hollow "luxury life" existance.
I've lived in the Middle East. I know plenty of people who live there, or lived there, and love it. Even those who were forced to leave. I know plenty of others who work very hard to get a good white collar job there, and most who succeed did not regret it.
And this is with full acknowledgment of all the bad things people talk about.
Let it just be a signal that there's more to it than you see. Even more, people don't seem to understand how crappy much of the rest of the world is that Dubai is such a desirable place to live. I know lots of people who would have been stuck in extremely low social mobility situations in their home countries, and who only managed to go up in social class by moving to one of these Middle Eastern countries, and earning good money and by doing honest work - the last of which wasn't an option in their own countries.
Honestly, I think this is a really difficult topic to discuss on the internet. It's too easy to misinterpret any "Their situation is awful, but was even worse before" as some sort of a justification, rather than seeing it as just being a statement of how things really are for a lot of people on this planet.
Due to where my family is originally from, I know people in the labor class in UAE who basically scarified their lives and bodies so their children could get an education and a white collar job. It was an terrible choice they had to make. Many people are forced to make the same choices in Western countries, but it's not in the news to the same degree. It's hard to have a rational discourse about life when the choices people have are starvation or suicide in their own country, or a lifetime of manual labor in a foreign country for wages that do nothing for them, but a lot for their families back home.