What they do experience is earning lots of tax-free money, and a vibrant city life. Obviously those negatives are all present but less of a threat than one might think from the outside.
Perhaps that seems like too much of a risk to some people. But to others, who aren’t living in “heaven-on-earth” first world countries it’s an easy gamble to make.
(Culturally hyper-conservative is especially hilarious for anyone who has been to a Dubai brunch.)
A few of my school friends moved out there (and Abu Dhabi), they see it as a sort of dream land where they can live a luxurious life they believe they thoroughly deserve and earned. They're a mixture of disbelieving there's some gross stuff going on and dismissive of its severity. An argument I've seen by one was that there are no countries that can escape criticism, which is true in a way but it just feels a bit more cruel and deliberate in the Gulf.
So that explains a little bit of the indifference to the defacto slavery, however these sort of stories where the person suffering is white may give them pause for thought...
I am not saying the things you mentioned do not happen, but they're not as overly apparent as they are in some other parts of the Middle East, or China.
The heat though, yeah, that's a thing. When you have air conditioned bus stops, it's a different level.
I doubt anybody who lived in the gulf for at least a year never been a witnness to extremely harsh treatment of debtors firsthand.
I myself knew a person who went to a debtor prison over a parking ticket.
This comes as a surprise to a lot of people who never been to UAE.
The percentage of uber-rich natives is grossly overestated by the popular image of the country. Nor there are that many really rich expats, unless with businesses outside of UAE, and who only come there to spend.
UAE is not a good place to make money in, but it's often a first choice for MNCs to setup in the region, as anywhere else in the region is even worse.
Only 10%-15% of the UAE population is somewhat close to American middle income standards.
Take this "slavery" nonsense for example. There is literally no difference between migration regime of a low-skilled worker and a highly-paid "expat". Rules are the same and they are way softer than, for example, H1B.
Millions used to be spent on smearing Dubai, so we will be hearing echoes of those "horror stories" for many years.
Other horror stories, which are not propaganda, are coming from cultural deafness. A Brit gets drunk, engages in sex on a public beach and then cries about "savage laws" when gets arrested. When in Rome, do like Romans, but some people think their view is better than anyone else's. I've seen Brits who think British laws should apply to them wherever they go.
Sorry, but that is just not true. You're always one mistake away from losing all your rights and going through a miserable experience. This could happen to anyone who is basically not royalty or extremely high ranks, I've experienced it first-hand.
Everyone knows this, so people are quite afraid to mess up, at any level. Ask any foreigner who has lived there (not just visited) for a while.
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.
Poor South Asian migrant workers are also treated better in Dubai. In Singapore they have a separate class of work visa with very limited rights, and during covid they were locked down in their worker dormitories for over a year, unable to interact with the rest of society.
Otherwise that's all fairly accurate. But Disney world is pretty damn great.
But, for sure, there's plenty of places in the world who operate in a similar way.
Some things seem to be universal.
I'm not making any assumptions about you in this post, but just making a comment.
I think the challenge here is that "welcoming" is relative to who you are, including your financial status and skin color.
There are countries people talk about on HN and Reddit which are super welcoming, everybody is friendly, great for remote work, taking an inexpensive vacation, etc.
I once traveled to one of those countries with a white friend. It was comical to see how differently we'd be treated even though we'd be walking next to each other on the road or sitting together at a restaurant. We're clearly friends and hanging out. He'd get his ass kissed and I'd be treated like a non-entity. Our English, human interaction skills, and financial status were pretty much the same. It's not like anybody could tell his passport or mine by looking at us.
Again, UAE and other countries in that region have lots of problems. So this isn't negating what you are saying.
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.
Most of the places people visit and live aren't absurdly hot. The largest cities in the middle east BY FAR are Ciaro, Tehran, Istanbul, and Baghdad.
Cairo is hot most of the year - but one of these places are hotter than Phoenix - which is currently one of the places people are moving to in droves in the US
Tehran & Istanbul, for example, aren't even much hotter than Los Angeles: https://weatherspark.com/y/105125/Average-Weather-in-Tehran-...
If you think Los Angeles has bad weather - you're just out of touch with almost everyone else in the world.
Riyadh and Dubai are VERY HOT. KSA is its own strange destination from a Western perspective. It's mostly religious. But Dubai is similar to Las Vegas and Miami in many ways - in the crowd it attracts and what people do there. It's still much hotter - I agree, don't know how people do it there.
There are 10 million people living in the UAE, 90% of which are expats. Lots of them live comfortable lives in the sense that they do what most people do - get jobs, have kids, do their daily routine, meet their friends, and all that regular stuff. They live normal regular lives and find fulfillment in those things.
It's no different than anywhere else in the world. If you live in UAE you'll find plenty of positive stories.
One thing I always laugh about is that my parents (who live outside of the USA) will text me asking about housing prices in my area, bad weather (that happened in a different state), some protest downtown (that I didn't even hear about), riots from police brutality and if it affects me, etc. But nobody seems to know that my neighborhood had a pot-luck where all the kids were having fun and the parents got a chance to meet each other and get to know the new people in the community.
It's no different living outside of UAE and hearing about UAE.
> less of a threat than one might think from the outside.
Until they're not. It's not like the "silly" laws in your country/state where you can duel on sundays and kill a man, these are applied grossly and unfairly to many people.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/10/woman-held-in-...
This is clearly visible at eg Riyadh immigration, where there are three unposted but universally observed lines: Gulf Arabs in white thobes, professionals of all sorts, and manual laborers.
If 10 percent of the country's population is native, they are surely benefiting from subsidized education, housing, preferential (read: racist) employment, free land, and so on.
It's VERY different from most places in the world, except for other sister nations that depend on oil wealth and have the same luxuries in immigrant exploitation.
I thought they were quite long suffering with "Briton arrested for not wearing a facemask in Singapore' because he said he didn't believe in them and wouldn't do it. I think he was jailed a couple of weeks and kicked out https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9864365/Briton-arre...
They can be a bit harsh with asking foreigners to leave if they have a work permit and lose their job. I think you get 30 days to go which is a bit of an upheaval if you are fired.
This is an extremely privileged way to think, and I am guessing, you are from a western country. You have had good access to food, and education while growing up. Just a guess... Families, who are on the borderline, or are deep in poverty, in countries such as Pakistan, India, or Bangladesh, go over there for opportunity. They will drive taxis, or work in construction, to send money back, and the remittance is massive. In the billions. It has helped people I know personally get out of poverty, and the children are now being educated in UK universities. These are people who grew up in South Asian villages without much hope.
I grew up in a country next to UAE, and it gave me excellent education in one of the best private schools around, exposure to many cultures, and I am now living in the US based on my life there.
But then again, I do hear from Africans in Southern Africa, why any minority would step foot into the US based on what they see in the news, and yet we have many risking their lives to cross a hostile desert region.
Dubai sells this luxury destination dream literally built by slaves.
You can’t be serious.
Nobody is withholding an expat’s passport while they live in boxes with 16 other people and working for months on end.
You’re making ridiculous comparisons and it makes me dubious of your intent here.
You forgot one: world's premier shopping mall destination.
This is not the case in the Arab world, for example. I grew up there and have seen horrors of which there is no documented evidence.
You are correct - despite all its flaws, the USA remains a magnet for talent from around the world.
Living there, as in being born there and having family and friendly connections, also presents a different set of moral and personal challenges vs. deciding to open a branch of my business there or taking a vacation there. In an abstract moral sense I'd like to divest myself of the US for a decade now, but that would be both materially dangerous until an alternative citizenship is effectively secured, and unfair to my family members who still live there.
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.
Even if they let you keep your passport, you still need an exit visa to leave. I've known wealthy upper class people to get stuck in the country for a bit because they had a dispute with their employer and the latter then refused to sign the paperwork so he could get an exit visa.
I've never been to this country but I've been to Vegas once and I somehow expect the whole experience to be very similar and to attract the same kind of people
Putting 16 people in the same "box" is also illegal and, frankly, I've never seen laborers being treated like that. I think you are making this up or referring to an outlier case.
Laborers have two options: take care of their own housing or live in a employer-provided accommodation. Bankers, obviously, choose the former, taxi drivers choose the latter. There is no law that says taxi drivers should be treated differently than bankers.
It helps if one imagines Dubai as a cruise ship: expats are treated as a typical cruise ship crew. Some sleep in bunks next to the engines, some pay to live in better rooms on higher decks, but the approach in general is the same. Each member of the crew is there temporarily and they know it. They are expected to do their job and leave once its over.
And whataboutism is also whataboutism, if I understand Wikipedia correctly. If I can call you out, you think being waited on by slaves is bad but give it a few thousand miles, then there's no mental gymnastics going on? Yeah we in the West^W capitalist world can pull the mental gymnastics and say "Well, it's the evil capitalist system, what can we do", oh hey, welcome to the class!
> Some commentators have defended the usage of whataboutism and tu quoque in certain contexts. Whataboutism can provide necessary context into whether or not a particular line of critique is relevant or fair. In international relations, behavior that may be imperfect by international standards may be quite good for a given geopolitical neighborhood, and deserves to be recognized as such.[12]
> Christian Christensen, Professor of Journalism in Stockholm, argues that the accusation of whataboutism is itself a form of the tu quoque fallacy, as it dismisses criticisms of one's own behavior to focus instead on the actions of another, thus creating a double standard. Those who use whataboutism are not necessarily engaging in an empty or cynical deflection of responsibility: whataboutism can be a useful tool to expose contradictions, double standards, and hypocrisy.[82][83]
Dubai is literally one of the biggest prostitution hub on the planet for western prostitutes. Google "yatching".
"server human rights abuse" is an understatement, it's straight out slavery practiced there, legal slavery.
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.
It's hard to get a visa to move to the US and teach at an elementary school. Yet you can do that in the Middle East.
It does not matter if you are a Pakistani prostitute, or a silicon valley programmer, an Indian construction worker, or a British engineer, they will pay you a salary three to seven times higher after taxes than what you make at home.
Further, if you dont have the merits for some well paid job, but they need someone to do it right now, they will pretend you do. So junior programmer with a half finished degree and half a year of experience as a web dev, but they need a senior engineer. Please welcome our senior engineer, and yeah the salary is 3-5x a senior engineer position. The downside is that when they call, you say yes today, dont ask about anything other than salary and start on monday, no matter where you happen to live at the moment or if you are still employed etc.
Oh and if you work there and are white, you write Christian on everything. That way, if you get thrown in prison, you can convert and ask to be released. Its not easy, but it is one of the few ways to get out if it really goes to shit. If you work there and are arab or look arab, you are muslim, and the right kind. If you are black... dont, just dont...
Members of all classes in the west benefit (in some ways) from from this arrangement, but only members of the capitalist classes are capable of changing it without revolutionary action. So, I know what I can do, but the first step involves rekindling class consciousness in the west which is rather a large order.
In the meantime while I do that, I can also not hit up a party in Dubai, and I think that's good too.
Or will you make the argument that confiscating laborers' passports is "quite good" for that geopolitical neighborhood?
1) Arrest you without telling you why? 2) Give you no access to a lawyer? 3) Give you no access to translation? 4) Have a debt system in prison, forcing to pay with money you don't have? 5) Retroactively apply laws? 6) Extend imprisonment indefinitely on made-up charges? 7) Ruled by a monarchy?
All the things you list boil down to pointing out the US system is imperfect, not that the system is bad by its very nature and design. UAE cannot be fixed without changing its ruling and legal system. The US can be fixed by improving its existing systems to make them more fair.
Also, the reason you point the failing of the US systems is because media is reporting on those failures. Not foreign media, local ones.
It wasn't even two decades ago that even professions like doctors, dentists, IT did better economically in the Middle East for many people in comparison to their home countries. Engineers making good money in India/China and not working for a consulting company is a pretty recent thing. A lot of that is changing now as other Asian countries are developing economically, but it's easy to forget how things were even a decade ago.
>It's hard to get a visa to move to the US and teach at an elementary school.
Plus, at least the visa situation in the Middle East is clear. It's not that difficult to get a work visa if you have a job offer and you can work as long as you have a job or until you retire. The visa situation in the US is...no comment :)
It's common knowledge that the Singapore government has ownership stakes in most successful companies operating here via our sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings, but I've never heard of private organisations being considered governmental bodies (like DIB in the article).
Our prisons aren't pleasant either [1], but I'm quite certain inmates get healthcare when necessary.
All in, I don't think anyone here would experience a lack of due process, or the same helplessness obtaining legal representation, like what I felt reading the article.
Singapore's police force and public prosecutor also practise a fair amount of prosecutorial discretion when it comes to charges [2], depending on how people plead their case before it goes to trial.
[1] https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/MDA1973?ProvIds=Sc2-#Sc2-
[2] https://singaporelegaladvice.com/law-articles/prosecutorial-...
Given that all the Indians I know think positively of Dubai, I'm inclined to think that it's very few of them, because surely they'd hear about slave conditions from people who went there before anyone else.
If you've ever been to Dubai, you'd know it's full of people from the subcontinent. Why would it be so full of them if a substantial fraction of them are kept as slaves? It just doesn't make sense. It's mostly the Western white crowd, as opposed to non-white immigrant populations, who think these sorts of things about Dubai.
edit: example of what I mean: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30387801
Dismissing all those people looking for a better life as "slave labor" just doesn't make sense.
Sorry to hear about your experience. Mine was wildly different, and I came away with entirely opposite impressions of their service industry.
> no public transport to speak of
How did you manage to miss all the huge flashy light rail stations? It was really convenient to use for travel throughout the city. Especially as a tourist -- just about all tourist destinations are close to a station.
I, for one, am glad we aren't going back to racist gating of citizenship privileges...behind literacy tests, or economic means
I, for one, am glad I live on a continent where mass shootings are a rare occurrence. One-off shootings too, and people accidentally hurting themselves with the things, for that matter.
Is 1% acceptable in your book vs. the majority of the workforce being in slave-labor-like conditions?
It's not ideal, but yeah. I definitely wouldn't look down on an entire city for not being able to root out that last 1% of corrupt employers.