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.
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.
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'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.
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 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 :)
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.
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.