On his way to India last year, Bryan Caplan connected through Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and toured its sister-city, Dubai, too. He shares his reflections on the United Arab Emirates:
In cleanliness and crime, UAE rivals Japan.
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The key ingredient of Emirati success: 88% of UAE’s population is foreign-born. That’s the highest share of any country on Earth.
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I chatted with workers from both Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone. Yes, would-be migrant workers face a government approval process, so the border is not 100% open. But if you want to work hard to make a better life for yourself, your prospects of landing a work visa are decent no matter how humble your credentials.
Abu Dhabi and Dubai are living proof that Michael Clemens’ “Trillion Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk” is literal truth. Both cities look like Coruscant from Star Wars. They are absolute marvels: Gleaming cities of the future where humanity gathers to produce massive wealth. And without mass immigration, almost none of this could have been built!
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In a country where everyone is rich, rich people would have to hire other rich people to clean their homes, cook their food, and watch their kids. In a nativist UAE, the only way to get good value for your money would be to leave the country!
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A typical demagogue would have objected, “We don’t want to become a minority in our own homeland,” but Zayed boldly forged ahead — and created a cruise ship the size of a country. Since 1971, UAE’s population has grown from 280K people to 9.5 million. A miraculous multiple of 34x.
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Most observers glowingly describe UAE’s overflowing welfare state. In a sense, they’re right.
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In a more important sense, however, the UAE’s welfare state is admirably austere, because these lavish benefits are limited to Emirati citizens — and these citizens are a tiny minority of the population. If 88% of the residents of Sweden were ineligible for redistribution, no one would call it “a generous welfare state” — no matter how high the benefits for the remaining 12% happened to be.
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Instead, the UAE has decisively Westernized two initially un-Western populations: native Arab Muslims and Third World migrants. How? By creating an economy dominated by Westernized multinationals. Though the Western population is low, their “soft power” has slowly but surely taken over the soul of the UAE. Verily, Western culture is a hardy weed.
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“What about businesses withholding their workers’ passports?” That’s now illegal, and locals tell me the new law is well-enforced. But either way, it’s a rounding error. Foreign workers have phones, so what do you think they tell their friends and family back home? “Don’t come; they’ll confiscate your passport”? Or, “Definitely come; in five years you’ll return a rich man”?
Ponder this: If a foreigner causes problems in the UAE, the standard punishment is deportation. So how dire could the problem of withholding passports have ever been? The main function of the new UAE law is not to protect foreign workers from employers but to protect the UAE’s reputation from international muckrackers.