Opinion | Dubai Is a Vision of the Future

This essay is part of The Great Migration, a series by Lydia Polgreen exploring how people are moving around the world today.

Laureen Fredah’s migrant journey began as something of a lark.

She was living in Kampala, the biggest city in Uganda, when she heard from a friend that Emirates, the flagship airline of the Gulf city of Dubai, was looking for flight attendants. The airline, part of the United Arab Emirates’ nation-building project, was expanding rapidly into Africa.

At first blush, it didn’t seem like a great opportunity. She came from a well-connected family, affluent enough to put her through college in Uganda though not so prosperous as to be able to send her to study abroad. She had the prospect of a good civil service position in Uganda, so a service job like flight attendant had not been on her list of attractive career options. But she also had long dreamed of becoming a lawyer and had vague ideas about going overseas.

“I didn’t have such a bad life in Uganda, but I just wanted something more,” Fredah told me.

The flight attendant job, it turned out, paid pretty well and could help put her through law school. Plus, it offered the kind of jet-age glamour that appeals to young people the world over. The competition was fierce: Hundreds of people tried out for the small handful of available positions. But with her willowy good looks and the silken charm she had honed in a stint as a presenter for the national television news service in Uganda, she made the cut. And so she packed her bags and flew to Dubai, the beginning of a journey that would take her not just to a new city but also to law school and a job as a lawyer for one of the most powerful firms in the Middle East.

“I worked my way to the top,” she told me, a sly smile playing across her face.

In our current age of vituperative anti-immigration politics, Western leaders seem to assume that the best and brightest people from poorer countries will always want to build their lives in the West, no matter how many hoops they need to jump through to be allowed in or how unwelcome they are made to feel on arrival.

But this attitude fails to understand the experiences of people like Fredah, who 15 years ago joined a relatively new tide of educated, middle- and upper middle-class people from Africa, Latin America, Asia and the wider Middle East who have flocked to the Gulf in search of opportunity.

Precise numbers can be hard to come by: Governments in the region generally do not make available public statistics tracking migrants by education or class as well as national origin. Yet in this shimmering city of skyscrapers and man-made archipelagos, of indoor ski slopes and sprawling mega-malls, I spoke to many ambitious people from across the global south who might once have set their sights on a career and life in the West. Faced with harder borders, inaccessible visas and a rise in anti-immigrant bigotry, many told me they have found a more welcoming berth in Dubai and are building new lives there instead.

“The reality of migration strongly contrasts with the popular idea of a massive South-North exodus,” the migration scholar Hein de Haas writes in his recent book, “How Migration Really Works,” which seeks to debunk many popular misconceptions about migration and calls for a radical rethinking of migration policy. “The Gulf region is as important a global migration destination as Western Europe.”

Historically, migration to places like Dubai has been highly stratified: lots of migrants from poor countries doing difficult and sometimes dangerous construction and service work, alongside a handful of Western expats engaged in the classic arbitrage of living income-tax free in a relatively inexpensive place where their education, skills and complexion command a premium.

But governments in the Gulf have been liberalizing their migration policies, opening up new opportunities for ambitious and talented people from across the globe by offering longer-term residency to skilled workers without a sponsor. In a bid to diversify and grow its economies, the region is throwing open its doors to entrepreneurs, engineers, artists, chefs, teachers, medical workers and educators, encouraging them not simply to work there for a few years and go home, but to consider building their lives there long term.

When I traveled to Dubai late last year, I found a city that is collapsing the distinction, never very meaningful in the first place, between migrant and expat in fascinating ways. For decades, the story of skilled migration followed a predictable path: People flowed from developing economies to the established powerhouses of North America and Europe. Dubai’s rise represents a dramatic rewriting of that story.

But these new arrivals are also participants in what is at times an uneasy experiment. The United Arab Emirates has never been part of the postwar agreements to accept the claims of asylum seekers or to welcome refugees. Unlike most Western countries, where skilled workers often can ultimately become citizens, the U.A.E. restricts that privilege almost entirely to its native populations.

As Dubai becomes a highly transactional magnet for human talent, it poses serious challenges to our ideas about citizenship and belonging — and sets aside some core tenets of the postwar era characterized by the relatively free movement of people across the globe. Dubai is, in many ways, a glimpse into what the future might look like.

Dubai is the most populous of the seven territories that make up the United Arab Emirates, but almost everyone who lives there is a foreigner: less than 10 percent of its residents are citizens.

As in other countries in the Gulf, the vast majority of its foreign population has long consisted of relatively low-skilled workers from countries in Asia and Africa — men who toiled for meager wages on its vast, sun-blasted construction sites and women who worked low-paying jobs as cleaners, nannies and cooks, all under a strict system known as kafala, which allowed them into the country on tightly restricted work permits. Such workers could legally stay only as long as they remained employed, and their employers regularly held on to their travel documents and had a virtual veto on whether they could take a different job. Many were housed in cramped worker hostels in far-flung parts of the city.

That system has come under much deserved criticism as Gulf countries have boomed and sought a bigger role on the global stage. Journalists and human rights workers have laid bare the devastating working conditions suffered by migrants, in which untold numbers have been maimed and killed while building the totems of the region’s ambitions, like the more than $220 billion in sporting facilities and tourist infrastructure Qatar built to host the World Cup in 2022. The scrutiny has led many places, including Dubai, to modestly reform their migrant labor policies, making it less difficult for workers to leave abusive employers for a new job, banning workplace discrimination and more.

These countries are not just responding to moral pressure, however. They are also recognizing that their diversifying economies require a broader range of skills and talents, and are changing their migration policies to reflect the increasing competition for skilled migrants of all kinds.

In the U.A.E., that has meant creating programs like the Golden Visa, which allows people with in-demand skills to live in the country for five or 10 years regardless of local employment. Initially this program was aimed at wealthy property investors and high-net-worth individuals, but it has expanded to include just about anyone making around $100,000 a year, as well as workers in high-demand fields like teaching and medicine. The number of those visas issued has roughly doubled every year since 2021, with 158,000 handed out in 2023, the last year for which complete data are available.

And while Western governments enact harsh deportation policies amid rising anti-migrant sentiment, Dubai has carried out multiple amnesty programs, allowing those who have overstayed their visas to regularize their status without having to leave.

These changes have drawn hundreds of thousands of new migrants to Dubai, and in my time there I met a broad array of recent arrivals. One was a young Colombian man from Medellín who hoped for a career in fashion. He left behind his picturesque hometown, which was once synonymous with drug trafficking and murder, because he felt priced out as the city has become a tourism hot spot and a destination for global nomads who work remotely.

I met a Russian software engineer who had decided to base his virtual reality company in Dubai, arriving before the invasion of Ukraine drew thousands of Russians eager to avoid military service and Western sanctions to the city. I met entrepreneurs from across the Middle East. And I met many, many Africans who had settled there, seeking to build careers and businesses in a city that, unlike Western capitals, seems ready to welcome them.

One of them was Babafemi Akinlade, a software specialist who had built a thriving cybersecurity business back home in Nigeria. But as his business grew, he found it difficult to get international partners to work with him as long as he was based in Africa. When he expanded to new markets elsewhere in the continent, it was often cumbersome to find direct flights to other African cities from Nigeria. Dubai solved those problems, and more.

“I settled on the good environment for my family,” he told me. “It’s a shorter commute to any part of Africa.”

Like many Africans I met, he had on occasion tried to travel to the West for business but found the intrusive process of getting a visa as a Nigerian citizen demeaning. In 2016 a German company had invited him to sign a deal to launch a streaming service in Nigeria, so he applied for a visa, handing over reams of private information about his family and finances. But it was turned down.

“They said we didn’t have enough ties,” he told me. Despite Akinlade having a successful business, young children and a wide family network, the German government seemed to fear that he would leave all that behind to live as an undocumented immigrant in Germany. The $3.5 million deal fell through, he said.

I met Akinlade at a celebration for Nigeria’s independence day, and his wife, Toyin, wandered over to join the conversation. She told me that Dubai suited her.

“It’s easier to raise children here, instill in them whatever morals,” she said. Plus, she added, Dubai is safer. “With three teenagers, I don’t want to have my heart in my throat every time they go out.”

Just about every parent I spoke to worried about the rigor of public school education in the West generally, but even more about safety, expressing a disbelief that gun violence and school shootings are so common in the United States. A smaller but not insignificant subset told me that they worried about what they saw as lax moral standards in the West and exposure to ideas they opposed, like homosexuality. This was something I heard not just from conservative Muslim parents but from African evangelical Christians as well. Many worried about racism and anti-migrant sentiment in Western nations. Why, they wondered, should they go where they were not wanted?

Like other people I met from the global south, they were interested in getting Western passports to ease their passage through the world. But few expressed interest in moving to the West full time. Froilan Malit Jr., a migration scholar who has lived in the Gulf for the past decade, said that skilled migrants who earn middle-class salaries preferred the lifestyle in Dubai — high-quality infrastructure, lower cost of living, easy access to flights just about anywhere, warm weather and no income taxes.

“I have my home, I pay no tax and I don’t need to expose my children to all that racism, discrimination around the clock,” he said. “South-South migration has created infrastructures, industries and cosmopolitan societies that are being seen by skilled migrants as an alternative.”

In a world where birthrates are plummeting and many countries are facing worker shortages, wealthy countries already compete for highly skilled migrants and will almost certainly need to compete for migrants of all kinds in the very near future. Dubai, like many places in the Gulf, offers an alternative to the allure of the West, but with limits.

The United Arab Emirates is an authoritarian monarchy, and citizenship rights are all but impossible for anyone but Emiratis to acquire. And living under Emirati law as a foreigner can be terrifying. One woman from the Philippines told me that her doctor reported her to the police for getting pregnant without being married, resulting in a harrowing investigation that could have ended in her deportation. Luckily, she was able to resolve the issue and stay.

Those who qualify for long-term visas can renew them, but there is no guarantee. Dubai has been through cycles of boom and bust, most spectacularly after the global financial crisis, which devastated the city’s crucial real estate sector, forcing many foreigners to leave. In a crisis, an architect from Buenos Aires might be just as unwelcome as a construction laborer from Kathmandu, no matter how golden the visa.

In theory, that’s not a problem in the West. Many Western countries offer most migrants who manage to get legal status, whether asylum or a work permit, some kind of path to permanent residency and citizenship, even if it is a very narrow one. With the demographic realities those countries face, those policies should represent a major advantage in the effort to attract workers.

But many wealthy nations are moving in the opposite direction, seeking to emulate aspects of the guest worker system Gulf countries have long employed, imposing strict limits on the rights of migrant workers. Usually these restrictions target low-skilled workers, but not always. Donald Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship in the United States is maybe the most extreme manifestation of the broader trend where migrants, no matter how long they or their families have lived in a country, could be at risk of expulsion. The Western anti-migrant right has long sought to make it more difficult for permanent residents and new citizens to bring family members to live with them.

At the same time, some wealthy countries are emulating the Gulf when it comes to affluent migrants, effectively selling long-term residence and the possibility of citizenship to rich people across the globe. Trump’s recent proposal to offer a “Gold Card” to “very high-level” foreigners for $5 million is a nakedly transactional gambit in this direction, but examples are legion.

Amid this ferment, people make choices.

Laureen Fredah, the flight attendant turned lawyer I met in Dubai, earned a law degree at a British university but insisted on taking the notoriously difficult New York bar exam to maximize her options. Fredah traveled to Albany to get admitted to the bar, describing the city as a “remote area.” It was the dead of winter. She brought along her mother, who had never been to the United States.

“She was in shock and she said, ‘Why would anyone want to live here?’” Fredah said. “The city was dirty. It was old as hell. Where was the affluence?”

I had met Laureen through a friend of hers, an investor named Isaac Kwaku Fokuo Jr., who invited us both to a plush private club in Dubai’s International Financial Center, where we had lunch. Fokuo was born in Ghana but his father, a Presbyterian minister, was sent by his church to work in the United States in the early 1990s. Life in America didn’t agree with his parents, who returned home after their four-year stint was up. Fokuo stayed for college and ultimately became a citizen. But he, too, returned to Africa, ending up in Dubai, where he runs an investment advisory firm that focuses on building businesses in the global south.

“In the last 10 years you’ve seen a pretty big increase in the African professionals in the U.A.E.,” he told me.

Even though Fredah passed the New York bar, she decided to stay in Dubai. Partly it was because of the pandemic, but she also appreciated how easy it is to get home to Uganda — several direct flights a day make the five-and-a-half-hour journey — and how easy it is for friends to come visit. If the right opportunity came along, she told me, she might consider a job in Singapore, Hong Kong or New York. I asked her if she aspired to get a Western passport to give her more options. She said she’d be happy to have one, but it wasn’t a huge priority.

“At one point we’ll want to pack up our bags and go home,” she said. “Maybe the future is just participation, not belonging,” she mused. “Maybe we are done putting down roots and will just keep moving.”