A glimpse of the future in Dubai
She was living in Kampala, the biggest city in Uganda, when she heard from a friend that Emirates, the flagship airline of the Persian Gulf city of Dubai, was looking for flight attendants.
Representative Image
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 Persian 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 said.
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.
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 Persian Gulf in search of opportunity.
"The reality of migration strongly contrasts with the popular idea of a massive South-North exodus,” 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.
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 Persian Gulf region have been liberalizing their migration policies, opening up opportunities for ambitious and talented people from across the globe by offering longer-term residency to skilled workers without a sponsor.
When I travelled 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 UAE 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 UAE 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 UAE, but almost everyone who lives there is a foreigner: Less than 10% of its residents are citizens.
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.
Even though Fredah passed the New York bar, she decided to stay in Dubai. “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.”
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