The main point is that the UAE (along with Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, etc.) limits citizenship and government benefits to citizens, and citizenship is basically impossible for immigrants or their descendants to attain. America's immigration model invites in tons of people, but makes it relatively easy for them to become citizens, vote, and …
The main point is that the UAE (along with Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, etc.) limits citizenship and government benefits to citizens, and citizenship is basically impossible for immigrants or their descendants to attain. America's immigration model invites in tons of people, but makes it relatively easy for them to become citizens, vote, and become public charges.
An aunt of mine is Indian-origin but has lived her entire life in Dubai; and she will never be an Emirati, legally or culturally. She will always be an Indian from Dubai, as will her descendants
The lack of a path to citizenship is one of the key problems with Brian's account. Those born of foreign parents in the country not citizens. And the workers will be deported if they do not have a job. Not sure the US can even do that.
The other is that the labor market is not free, and I would dispute his argument that the people who come are consistently willing to stay. Menial laborers are often trapped in a form of debt bondage that can be hard to distinguish from slavery. A recruiter tells pretty stories of good working conditions and high pay in a very poor country, the gullible young believe and pay him to get them over there, they actually get terrible working conditions, bad pay, are stuck in debt for the cost to get there, lack resources to get home, and are threatened with prison if they don't pay their debts. And companies often don't pay at all with no legal recourse for these workers. Strikes are illegal.
I lived in another middle eastern country, their health care workers were largely filipina nurses (20+ years ago), and they had serious problems with confiscated passports and salaries that were not paid back then. And they were much better educated than the construction workers building Dubai.
Bryan brushes off the reports of passport withholding as irrelevant since deportation is the punishment for not having a job anyway. But debts are treated very harshly, and that can include the debts incurred to get there or to get home. They can't leave without paying off their debts; people may fear for their lives not working. And there are new suckers to come, so competition does not drive up wages to livable levels. Poor people do not seem to be working and then coming home rich.
So there is a rich native class who can work or not as they prefer, with welfare paid from oil revenues. A middle class of foreign workers with skill and knowledge who have some leverage to get paid and not treated abysmally, but still no long term residence rights. And a working class doing menial labor at very low wages often in some form of debt slavery and limited options to get home.
This is possibly one of the worst cases to use to argue for open borders. It is certainly not a viable option in the US, and most of us would consider it immoral in practice. Unless we could hide it from ourselves as the UAE does so well.
I have heard horror stories of Filipinas being pressured into sex work in Singapore because they owed a LOT of money to the agencies that sponsored their flights and visas. They were free to leave at any time, but they would be in debt, back in the Philippines and it's hard to make up the money to pay back this debt at Filipino wages. Part of the problem was the visa fees. If it was just the flights they had to pay back, it wouldn't be so bad, given that Singapore is pretty close to the Philippines. I don't know if there are any visa fees in the UAE. But I hope they are reasonable and perhaps workers should not have to pay any visa fees for the first 3 months. That would give them a chance to save up and not go into debt.
I have heard horror stories about Qatar, too. You can't work for any employer other than your sponsor. And you can't leave the country unless your sponsor lets you. That's basically slavery!
How does the debt bondage work, if you just leave the country? Seems like it should be pretty hard to collect.
And again: even the people in the worst debt bondage have a phone these days, or know someone with a phone, or can dictate a letter. So why are new arrivals still coming?
Leaving the country isn't trivial without a passport or money. Plane or boat, so you need a ticket and a passport. No one just driving away or taking public transport.
Non payment of debt is a jailable criminal offense - no leaving the country. And with that power available, banks there are much more aggressive about pursuing debtors than they are in the first world countries.
Dynamics are changing, phones are more common, maybe that is enough to end this in the long run. But phones everywhere is still fairly new. And poor young men have always taken great risks to improve their fortune. They hear a mix of stories and lies, some believe, maybe they are getting paid better than at home still, just not what was promised or in the promised conditions, enough believe the worst cases won't happen to them, and for years the flow has continued.
Exactly. It’s a temporary arbitrage. It’s completely unworkable as a permanent — not merely long-term, but *permanent* — engine of growth.
Either you accept its impermanence along with the inevitable resulting stagnation, or you pivot to building a more permanent engine of growth that is not dependent on a pair of exhaustible arbitrages (oil and poorer foreigners).
Stagnation from a 20x higher level is far preferable to pathetic near-zero growth from a much lower level. At least for many, many generations of human lifespans.
Imo you are (immorally) allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
If the standard of living as a (permanent) guest worker is literally 20x higher, but with a 0% growth rate from there, than for someone being a full-fledged resident of a poor country - even a democratic one - with a real growth rate of only 0.1% per year, it would take many, many generations before the descendants of the latter are better off than the descendants of the former.
Hey, if you’re in a high growth poor country and choose to stay, great.
Or you can choose to work in the massively higher wage country for a few years or decades, and move back when it’s advantageous to do so.
Plus in the real world there ain’t evidence for your claim that the UAE model must stagnate.
More importantly, for every Bangladesh with growth rates like you cite, there are multiple African countries with growth rates around what I cite.
At most you are only arguing with me re: how many generations it will take. You cannot seriously argue that it is bad for the immigrants to have that choice. Or to make that choice.
The first world should shut its border to most of the third world, including mass deportations of many existing illegals. It should continue economic growth and human advancement, as it has uniquely done for hundreds of years now. If first world scientists one day solve the problem of third world genetics, we can consider changing immigration policy in that future generations from now.
"Is Singapore not scalable?"
Singapore specifically? Obviously not. Have you been to Singapore? Have you seen the cargo ships as far as the eye can see? The whole world can't be a commerce hub. You might as well ask if all of Japan could be the business district of Tokyo.
Singapore is at least more scalable than the UAE. It acted as a lab for how the Han could liberalize, which is what LKY intended. It probably helped a great deal in the development of China to see such an example, but all of China can't be Singapore.
But your suggestion would not make the UAE better off.
Nor IMO would completely shutting borders to legal immigrants make first world countries better off. But admittedly that is a much longer discussion.
And I reject your strongly implied assertion that genetics and IQ are anywhere close to the biggest portion of the problem (which do not misunderstand is different from me claiming that it explains 0% of the differences).
The first world solved the "problem of third world genetics" ages ago. The solution is the Law of Comparative Advantage. In a free market economy, everyone has something to contribute. Even if you have no genetic advantages over anyone else, you have comparative advantage in something.
Mass immigration was one of the main reasons that the first world was able to continue economic growth and human advancement. Without mass immigration the USA would be a small, moderately influential nation instead of a global superpower. Allowing in mass influxes of foreigners from what were (at the time) third world countries transformed the US economy into a powerhouse. Genetics has always been irrelevant, someone only suited for menial tasks can still free up a brighter person to work on more advanced tasks.
Shutting borders and mass deportation are among the worst possible things the US could do if it wants to contribute to economic growth and human advancement. It is stupid to deport a huge chunk of our workforce. It is stupid to deprive ourselves of what future immigrants can contribute, regardless of whether those contributions are large or small, every little bit helps. Immigrants don't cause enough problems to be worth giving up those benefits. If there's anything that the rise of the Trump cult has taught us, it's that the true threat to the fabric of American society isn't low-IQ immigrants, it's populist natives.
I think it's less that the UAE and Singapore models are not scalable and more that people don't want them to be scalable because if they were that would mean that nativists are wrong about everything. The USA and EU have already scaled open borders in other ways, people in the US often live in one state and work in another, people in the EU can often work in countries where they are not citizens. I think people don't want to admit that nativism is 100% stupid and wrong. It is so popular that doing so sounds antidemocratic, people assume it has to have some sort of valid point, but I think the evidence against it is strong enough that we have to.
Putting all of Singapore under the label of Han is pretty silly.
Singapore, especially her modern founding population, was full of dialect groups. (When talking about Chinese 'dialect' is the politically correct way to talk about the different languages in the Sinosphere.)
In the meantime, it is a hell of a lot more moral, and makes the overwhelming number of immigrants who do choose to do so a *lot* better off than their alternative to stay in their own country.
The problem is at some point the guest workers, especially the high skilled ones, are going to start demanding a political voice, and the citizens won't be able to kick them out because the guest workers are the only ones who know how to run the economy.
Top talent is plentiful in the world. If you have the money to pay for them...
And lolz. UAE is not gonna be stupid enough to let them run the military and such similar vital sectors without oversight. These high skilled workers are easily replaceable by UAE.
That's true relative to the UAE, since it is small and can buy talent from the whole globe. Actual first world societies that create that talent vastly outnumber it.
Also, the UAE isn't actually creating human advancement in technology and engineering. It's just copy pasting luxury hotels which doesn't require the really top tier talent.
Even the military and such can buy things invented by superior societies, and the UAE is protected by the west against other powers. As long as it remains a tiny niche player it can free ride on the accomplishments of real nations.
You seem to think that R&D is the only measure of a country's strength. There are other aspects. If you have a well run country that brings joy and material goods to its citizens, those same citizens will likely be very happy despite the number of patents per capita being very low.
“The problem is at some point the guest workers, especially the high skilled ones, are going to start demanding a political voice, and the citizens won't be able to kick them out because the guest workers are the only ones who know how to run the economy.”
That doesn’t strike me as a bad problem; that strikes me as a win-win opportunity.
I had suggested, around that time, as a keyhole solution to immigration: hWhat if a country let immigrants in, to live and work, but never let them become citizens. My brother said: "Careful, people won't put up with that forever, you'd end up with riots, like in France."
Seeing the success of the UAE and Qatar, hwhere MOST residents aren't Citizens, I've come to realize: Yea, this is not actually THAT much of a problem. I think the reason the French were rioting was that they were unemployed, not that they weren't Citizens or couldn't vote. In fact, I have since learned that the French LOVE to riot. So, it actually sounds to me like these rioters in 2005 were quite integrated. They were French, indeed!
Still, I think there ought to be SOME path to Citizenship for temporary foreign workers. But I do understand the risk of them voting in the policies of the "shithole countries" they left. In order to mitigate that risk, I propose that, in order to vote in a country, you must have actually lived there for 7 of the past 10 years. This would reduce the risk of, for example, pro-abortion activists moving to Malta, voting to legalize abortion, then leaving. (Although this is only a ridiculous hypothetical situation I thought of in my own mind. Technically, this could happen in the US, i.e. pro-abortion Californians could move to Mississippi and legalize abortion through ballot initiative then move back to California, but I doubt it is!) And pay about $37,000 (indexed to inflation for the year you actually finish paying it).
But it seems awfully unfair that people born in the country or to Citizens of the country would be exempt from this. This reminds me of the "grandfather clause" for poll taxes/tests. Soooo... Don't exempt ANYBODY. Eliminate Birthright Citizenship for everybody! NOBODY is a Citizen until they lived in the country for at least 7 years and paid their dues!
In the interim they have developed a much higher standard of living. Free Billion dollar bills on the side walk.
And if they eventually naturalize the high-skill immigrants, doing that versus said high-skill immigrants leaving would pretty clearly be in the interest of native citizens anywhere.
It would only be bad if somehow the high skill immigrants played a game of chicken saying “naturalize us and all our low skill brethren as well or we are outta here.” But that strikes me as a *highly* unlikely scenario.
“naturalize us and all our low skill brethren as well or we are outta here.”
That is literally what happened with Jim Crow and Apartheid. A faction of elites decided that universal suffrage was a human right and imposed it. Maybe they were idealists, maybe they saw it as a path tot their own power, whatever. It keeps happening everywhere over and over.
Prop 187 simply stated that illegal immigrants shouldn't get welfare or be allowed to vote. It was put on hold by a judge the day it passed and California became a hard left state.
Jim Crow and apartheid applied to people who had been in the country “forever”, not *immigrants*. IMO not the same situation at all as high skill vs low skill immigrants in the UAE.
Re Prop 187 and CA, I don’t argue with you one whit. But now we are talking apples and oranges. Massive illegal, overwhelmingly low skill immigration is not the same as entirely legal with plenty of high skill immigration, coupled to a system where there is no risk that the inmates will run the asylum.
Nothing anyone has said has contradicted the idea that naturalizing the high skill immigrants would be a good thing for the UAE, not a bad thing, and that there is no reason to believe it would have to be all or nothing.
The main point is that the UAE (along with Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, etc.) limits citizenship and government benefits to citizens, and citizenship is basically impossible for immigrants or their descendants to attain. America's immigration model invites in tons of people, but makes it relatively easy for them to become citizens, vote, and become public charges.
An aunt of mine is Indian-origin but has lived her entire life in Dubai; and she will never be an Emirati, legally or culturally. She will always be an Indian from Dubai, as will her descendants
The lack of a path to citizenship is one of the key problems with Brian's account. Those born of foreign parents in the country not citizens. And the workers will be deported if they do not have a job. Not sure the US can even do that.
The other is that the labor market is not free, and I would dispute his argument that the people who come are consistently willing to stay. Menial laborers are often trapped in a form of debt bondage that can be hard to distinguish from slavery. A recruiter tells pretty stories of good working conditions and high pay in a very poor country, the gullible young believe and pay him to get them over there, they actually get terrible working conditions, bad pay, are stuck in debt for the cost to get there, lack resources to get home, and are threatened with prison if they don't pay their debts. And companies often don't pay at all with no legal recourse for these workers. Strikes are illegal.
I lived in another middle eastern country, their health care workers were largely filipina nurses (20+ years ago), and they had serious problems with confiscated passports and salaries that were not paid back then. And they were much better educated than the construction workers building Dubai.
Bryan brushes off the reports of passport withholding as irrelevant since deportation is the punishment for not having a job anyway. But debts are treated very harshly, and that can include the debts incurred to get there or to get home. They can't leave without paying off their debts; people may fear for their lives not working. And there are new suckers to come, so competition does not drive up wages to livable levels. Poor people do not seem to be working and then coming home rich.
So there is a rich native class who can work or not as they prefer, with welfare paid from oil revenues. A middle class of foreign workers with skill and knowledge who have some leverage to get paid and not treated abysmally, but still no long term residence rights. And a working class doing menial labor at very low wages often in some form of debt slavery and limited options to get home.
This is possibly one of the worst cases to use to argue for open borders. It is certainly not a viable option in the US, and most of us would consider it immoral in practice. Unless we could hide it from ourselves as the UAE does so well.
I have heard horror stories of Filipinas being pressured into sex work in Singapore because they owed a LOT of money to the agencies that sponsored their flights and visas. They were free to leave at any time, but they would be in debt, back in the Philippines and it's hard to make up the money to pay back this debt at Filipino wages. Part of the problem was the visa fees. If it was just the flights they had to pay back, it wouldn't be so bad, given that Singapore is pretty close to the Philippines. I don't know if there are any visa fees in the UAE. But I hope they are reasonable and perhaps workers should not have to pay any visa fees for the first 3 months. That would give them a chance to save up and not go into debt.
I have heard horror stories about Qatar, too. You can't work for any employer other than your sponsor. And you can't leave the country unless your sponsor lets you. That's basically slavery!
How does the debt bondage work, if you just leave the country? Seems like it should be pretty hard to collect.
And again: even the people in the worst debt bondage have a phone these days, or know someone with a phone, or can dictate a letter. So why are new arrivals still coming?
Leaving the country isn't trivial without a passport or money. Plane or boat, so you need a ticket and a passport. No one just driving away or taking public transport.
Non payment of debt is a jailable criminal offense - no leaving the country. And with that power available, banks there are much more aggressive about pursuing debtors than they are in the first world countries.
Dynamics are changing, phones are more common, maybe that is enough to end this in the long run. But phones everywhere is still fairly new. And poor young men have always taken great risks to improve their fortune. They hear a mix of stories and lies, some believe, maybe they are getting paid better than at home still, just not what was promised or in the promised conditions, enough believe the worst cases won't happen to them, and for years the flow has continued.
The people offering the opportunities might be lying about conditions, sure. That has always been the case.
But friends and family who have moved ahead of them have no real incentives to entice young men to go, if debt bondage is all that would await them.
I dont think bryan cares about citizenship. He cares about economic wellbeing and living standards.
The right to vote is, if i remember correctly, irrelevant to him
Yeah, it’s amazing how well the first class of citizens can live when you don’t need to worry about the second class.
You entirely miss the point that the second-class residents go there voluntarily because they are better off there than in their home countries.
We get it. It's still not sustainable or scalable. Apartheid states don't work long term and the world can only support so many petrostates.
Exactly. It’s a temporary arbitrage. It’s completely unworkable as a permanent — not merely long-term, but *permanent* — engine of growth.
Either you accept its impermanence along with the inevitable resulting stagnation, or you pivot to building a more permanent engine of growth that is not dependent on a pair of exhaustible arbitrages (oil and poorer foreigners).
Stagnation from a 20x higher level is far preferable to pathetic near-zero growth from a much lower level. At least for many, many generations of human lifespans.
Imo you are (immorally) allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
You’re gonna hafta unpack that. Your baselines don’t make sense.
If the standard of living as a (permanent) guest worker is literally 20x higher, but with a 0% growth rate from there, than for someone being a full-fledged resident of a poor country - even a democratic one - with a real growth rate of only 0.1% per year, it would take many, many generations before the descendants of the latter are better off than the descendants of the former.
But real growth rates of poorer countries are never consistently as low as 0.1%.
Sri Lanka is about 10x poorer than UAE, and had 6% growth from 2003-2012.
Bangladesh is actually 20-100x poorer and yet has grown ~7.7% since 2022, catching up a lot of ground on UAE in exponential terms.
Hey, if you’re in a high growth poor country and choose to stay, great.
Or you can choose to work in the massively higher wage country for a few years or decades, and move back when it’s advantageous to do so.
Plus in the real world there ain’t evidence for your claim that the UAE model must stagnate.
More importantly, for every Bangladesh with growth rates like you cite, there are multiple African countries with growth rates around what I cite.
At most you are only arguing with me re: how many generations it will take. You cannot seriously argue that it is bad for the immigrants to have that choice. Or to make that choice.
My point was that no matter how many generations of runway UAE has, they’ll eventually run out and have to pivot to something else.
And the more they avoid pivoting now, the harder it will be to successfully execute the pivot when the time comes.
Nothing is permanent. The sun will go nova.
Apartheid based on skin color with radically different negative rights is very different than a permanent very large guest worker program.
People should be Free to Choose.
What is your alternative? Closed borders? Open borders with a generous welfare state for everyone physically present in the country?
Is Singapore not scalable?
No one has even mentioned that most of these immigrants are not coming from democracies, let alone high income democracies.
"What is your alternative?"
The first world should shut its border to most of the third world, including mass deportations of many existing illegals. It should continue economic growth and human advancement, as it has uniquely done for hundreds of years now. If first world scientists one day solve the problem of third world genetics, we can consider changing immigration policy in that future generations from now.
"Is Singapore not scalable?"
Singapore specifically? Obviously not. Have you been to Singapore? Have you seen the cargo ships as far as the eye can see? The whole world can't be a commerce hub. You might as well ask if all of Japan could be the business district of Tokyo.
Singapore is at least more scalable than the UAE. It acted as a lab for how the Han could liberalize, which is what LKY intended. It probably helped a great deal in the development of China to see such an example, but all of China can't be Singapore.
I have been to Singapore.
I have never advocated fully open borders.
But your suggestion would not make the UAE better off.
Nor IMO would completely shutting borders to legal immigrants make first world countries better off. But admittedly that is a much longer discussion.
And I reject your strongly implied assertion that genetics and IQ are anywhere close to the biggest portion of the problem (which do not misunderstand is different from me claiming that it explains 0% of the differences).
"But your suggestion would not make the UAE better off."
Correct, the UAE has little native talent and a unique socioeconomic context in which I think the decisions they made were fantastically correct.
My assertion is that that context doesn't hold outside the UAE and similar areas.
"And I reject your strongly implied assertion that genetics and IQ are anywhere close to the biggest portion of the problem"
There are all sorts of problems with diversity, that's just the easiest to explain and document.
The first world solved the "problem of third world genetics" ages ago. The solution is the Law of Comparative Advantage. In a free market economy, everyone has something to contribute. Even if you have no genetic advantages over anyone else, you have comparative advantage in something.
Mass immigration was one of the main reasons that the first world was able to continue economic growth and human advancement. Without mass immigration the USA would be a small, moderately influential nation instead of a global superpower. Allowing in mass influxes of foreigners from what were (at the time) third world countries transformed the US economy into a powerhouse. Genetics has always been irrelevant, someone only suited for menial tasks can still free up a brighter person to work on more advanced tasks.
Shutting borders and mass deportation are among the worst possible things the US could do if it wants to contribute to economic growth and human advancement. It is stupid to deport a huge chunk of our workforce. It is stupid to deprive ourselves of what future immigrants can contribute, regardless of whether those contributions are large or small, every little bit helps. Immigrants don't cause enough problems to be worth giving up those benefits. If there's anything that the rise of the Trump cult has taught us, it's that the true threat to the fabric of American society isn't low-IQ immigrants, it's populist natives.
I think it's less that the UAE and Singapore models are not scalable and more that people don't want them to be scalable because if they were that would mean that nativists are wrong about everything. The USA and EU have already scaled open borders in other ways, people in the US often live in one state and work in another, people in the EU can often work in countries where they are not citizens. I think people don't want to admit that nativism is 100% stupid and wrong. It is so popular that doing so sounds antidemocratic, people assume it has to have some sort of valid point, but I think the evidence against it is strong enough that we have to.
Putting all of Singapore under the label of Han is pretty silly.
Singapore, especially her modern founding population, was full of dialect groups. (When talking about Chinese 'dialect' is the politically correct way to talk about the different languages in the Sinosphere.)
But keeping foreigners out works better?
The differential can’t last forever.
“The differential can’t last forever.”
If you say so.
In the meantime, it is a hell of a lot more moral, and makes the overwhelming number of immigrants who do choose to do so a *lot* better off than their alternative to stay in their own country.
The problem is at some point the guest workers, especially the high skilled ones, are going to start demanding a political voice, and the citizens won't be able to kick them out because the guest workers are the only ones who know how to run the economy.
Invite in other guest workers. Lolz
That works less well with the high skilled ones, especially since they're likely to be effectively running the country at that point.
Top talent is plentiful in the world. If you have the money to pay for them...
And lolz. UAE is not gonna be stupid enough to let them run the military and such similar vital sectors without oversight. These high skilled workers are easily replaceable by UAE.
"Top talent is plentiful in the world."
That's true relative to the UAE, since it is small and can buy talent from the whole globe. Actual first world societies that create that talent vastly outnumber it.
Also, the UAE isn't actually creating human advancement in technology and engineering. It's just copy pasting luxury hotels which doesn't require the really top tier talent.
Even the military and such can buy things invented by superior societies, and the UAE is protected by the west against other powers. As long as it remains a tiny niche player it can free ride on the accomplishments of real nations.
You seem to think that R&D is the only measure of a country's strength. There are other aspects. If you have a well run country that brings joy and material goods to its citizens, those same citizens will likely be very happy despite the number of patents per capita being very low.
I don't care whether I have a political voice, I care about how much money I earn. Voting is a waste of time.
…and most especially if I’m poor now.
But I DO feel *so* much better that rich westerners think that it’s terrible to give me more opportunities to improve my family’s standard of living…
Doesn't look like it's happening in the UAE.
“The problem is at some point the guest workers, especially the high skilled ones, are going to start demanding a political voice, and the citizens won't be able to kick them out because the guest workers are the only ones who know how to run the economy.”
That doesn’t strike me as a bad problem; that strikes me as a win-win opportunity.
I remember, several years ago, there were riots in France involving African immigrants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_French_riots
I had suggested, around that time, as a keyhole solution to immigration: hWhat if a country let immigrants in, to live and work, but never let them become citizens. My brother said: "Careful, people won't put up with that forever, you'd end up with riots, like in France."
Seeing the success of the UAE and Qatar, hwhere MOST residents aren't Citizens, I've come to realize: Yea, this is not actually THAT much of a problem. I think the reason the French were rioting was that they were unemployed, not that they weren't Citizens or couldn't vote. In fact, I have since learned that the French LOVE to riot. So, it actually sounds to me like these rioters in 2005 were quite integrated. They were French, indeed!
Still, I think there ought to be SOME path to Citizenship for temporary foreign workers. But I do understand the risk of them voting in the policies of the "shithole countries" they left. In order to mitigate that risk, I propose that, in order to vote in a country, you must have actually lived there for 7 of the past 10 years. This would reduce the risk of, for example, pro-abortion activists moving to Malta, voting to legalize abortion, then leaving. (Although this is only a ridiculous hypothetical situation I thought of in my own mind. Technically, this could happen in the US, i.e. pro-abortion Californians could move to Mississippi and legalize abortion through ballot initiative then move back to California, but I doubt it is!) And pay about $37,000 (indexed to inflation for the year you actually finish paying it).
But it seems awfully unfair that people born in the country or to Citizens of the country would be exempt from this. This reminds me of the "grandfather clause" for poll taxes/tests. Soooo... Don't exempt ANYBODY. Eliminate Birthright Citizenship for everybody! NOBODY is a Citizen until they lived in the country for at least 7 years and paid their dues!
It's bad for the native Emirate citizens.
“It's bad for the native Emirate citizens.”
How is it bad for them?
In the interim they have developed a much higher standard of living. Free Billion dollar bills on the side walk.
And if they eventually naturalize the high-skill immigrants, doing that versus said high-skill immigrants leaving would pretty clearly be in the interest of native citizens anywhere.
It would only be bad if somehow the high skill immigrants played a game of chicken saying “naturalize us and all our low skill brethren as well or we are outta here.” But that strikes me as a *highly* unlikely scenario.
“naturalize us and all our low skill brethren as well or we are outta here.”
That is literally what happened with Jim Crow and Apartheid. A faction of elites decided that universal suffrage was a human right and imposed it. Maybe they were idealists, maybe they saw it as a path tot their own power, whatever. It keeps happening everywhere over and over.
Prop 187 simply stated that illegal immigrants shouldn't get welfare or be allowed to vote. It was put on hold by a judge the day it passed and California became a hard left state.
Jim Crow and apartheid applied to people who had been in the country “forever”, not *immigrants*. IMO not the same situation at all as high skill vs low skill immigrants in the UAE.
Re Prop 187 and CA, I don’t argue with you one whit. But now we are talking apples and oranges. Massive illegal, overwhelmingly low skill immigration is not the same as entirely legal with plenty of high skill immigration, coupled to a system where there is no risk that the inmates will run the asylum.
Nothing anyone has said has contradicted the idea that naturalizing the high skill immigrants would be a good thing for the UAE, not a bad thing, and that there is no reason to believe it would have to be all or nothing.
Personally I would never make a new life in a country if I had very little prospect of staying there permanently
How well (or poorly) does this non-citizen live? Is there trickle-down in the UAE?
Better than where they arrived from, there is a reason they keep coming and telling their relatives about it which induces more arrivals.
"Is there trickle-down in the UAE?"
Economics is not zero sum there.
Nor anywhere else. It's super easy to destroy anything, ie make the sum smaller.