City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (41 page)

The demographic imbalance is the hottest topic in the UAE, or it was until the economy began to sink. In a country where political opposition is stifled and complaints about society are made in private, the “foreigner problem” has spawned a bold national debate and an anti-immigration backlash. Citizens are starting to blame the crisis on their rulers, even if they rarely mention them by name.

Immigration is a talk radio staple, just like in the United States and Britain, except the banter in the UAE carries an edge of desperation. Americans and Britons typically oppose immigration on economic grounds, however spurious. In the UAE, where immigration clearly undergirds the economy, Emiratis call it a national security crisis. Dubai’s police chief, Gen. Dhahi Khalfan, says the swelling foreign population endangers the reign of UAE royal families. If not curbed, Emiratis will lose control of their country.

“I’m afraid we are building towers but losing the Emirates,” Khalfan said at a national identity conference in April 2008. “We are at a crossroads. Unless drastic action is taken we will disappear in the waves of foreign workers.”

In the United States, the government defuses any security threat by granting immigrants citizenship. In the UAE, citizenship is guarded like a vault of nuclear fuel rods. It’s impossible to get near it. Nationality is passed down the male blood line, from Emirati men to their children. If an Emirati woman marries a foreign husband, even a man from her own tribe who happens to be a citizen of, say, Oman, neither the husband nor the couple’s children receive UAE citizenship. They can live in the country their entire lives, speak Gulf Arabic, pray at the mosque five times a day. They’ll always be foreigners. Many other residents who never took nationality in the UAE after 1971 have no citizenship at all. They and their offspring are the
bidoun
—the “withouts”—those with no nationality.
⁵

Most people born in the UAE take citizenship in their parents’ countries, even if they’ve never lived in those countries. My son Jay is one. He holds a U.S. passport like mine and a British passport like my wife’s, but he was born and is being raised in Dubai. He’s got no chance of getting citizenship in the country of his birth. Indians and Pakistanis make up the greatest number of UAE-born foreigners, with multiple generations born and raised in the UAE, often with no connection to the land of their ancestors.
⁶

Anti-immigrant activists in the UAE believe this situation could soon change. When Sheikh Mohammed allowed foreigners to buy property in 2002, he may have unwittingly given them additional rights under international law. Many properties sold in Dubai came with permanent residency visas. Now, academics believe foreigners can argue—successfully—in an international court that those privileges give them
rights of citizenship. One successful test case could swing the balance, at least in the eyes of the international community, says Mohammed al-Roken, a lawyer and dissident in Dubai who favors shipping foreigners home before this happens.

Al-Roken, forty-four, is a big man with a charismatic smile and a forceful personality. He was once the head of the UAE Jurists’ Association, akin to the bar. Al-Roken taught constitutional law at UAE University and wrote a column for the newspaper
Al Khaleej
until 2000, when the government forced him to stop. He is one of the few Emirati professionals who doesn’t keep portraits of the ruling sheikhs on his office wall.

“Foreigners living here have built the country. Some have been here two or three generations. They have no ties whatsoever to their mother countries,” al-Roken says. “It’s against their human rights to deprive them of citizenship.”

If Washington or the United Nations—or another international organization—pressures the UAE to recognize second-class residents as citizens, al-Roken doesn’t think the UAE government could resist for long. Naturalizing hundreds of thousands of foreigners would topple the country’s Arab heritage. The UAE would become a multiethnic state like Afghanistan or Iran. Foreigners could take control of Dubai, perhaps declaring it an independent city-state. It’s not far-fetched. Singapore seceded from Malaysia in 1965 under similar circumstances. Chinese and Indian immigrants overwhelmed the local Malays and then declared independence. Malays now form less than 15 percent of Singapore’s population. That’s a high percentage compared to Dubai. Al-Roken believes Dubai could go the way of Singapore within a decade.

Dubai’s locals exhibit a strange combination of comfort and uncertainty. Emiratis marvel at the lush life that envelops them, but they gape as foreigners pour into a city they no longer recognize: skyscrapers thrusting up from the sand, and colossal highways seething with BMWs and sewage tankers. Few have a clue where they’re being dragged. But they stay quiet and the payoff keeps coming. Each new immigrant notches a slight boost to the value of Emirati citizenship. As Dubai gives itself to migrants, locals reap ever-higher subsidies and access to education and high-salary
jobs in the city-state’s power structure. Citizenship is increasingly a badge of privilege.

Umm Hussain is a thirty-nine-year-old housewife in Dubai’s Al Twar section. She lives with her husband and three of her children, her disabled mother, and a staff of maids and a gardener. The house is modest by Dubai standards, with tasseled couches, chiffon curtains, and slipcovered tables lined with dishes of homemade Arabic sweets. Umm Hussain is an
Ajam
, an Arab of Iranian ancestry. She grew up in a narrow house on a crowded
sikka
, or alley, in the Dubai Gold Souk, a neighborhood now packed with Pakistani and Nigerian men. She doesn’t know what to think of Dubai these days. On the one hand, she’s proud of the name Dubai is making for itself. She felt like a celebrity, being showered with compliments on a recent trip to Germany by people fascinated with Dubai. Her daughter lives in Australia, where she, too, hears admiration for Sheikh Mohammed’s creations.

On the other hand, she can’t find her way around town anymore. With the traffic and what she sees as aggressive foreigners, Umm Hussain prefers to stay home. On the day I stopped by, she wore a modest rose-print gown and a gold-trimmed black headscarf that accentuated a friendly face with a ready smile. She pressed me with glasses of watermelon juice and sweets, bustled me on a tour of the house, and spoke wistfully of happy times in the
sikka
, when neighbors would spend the afternoon chatting.

In those days, Umm Hussain’s mother and grandmother baked bread in a clay oven in the courtyard. Sometimes they’d split open a fish, rub it with spices, and roast it on a flat stone. If someone came home with a tuna, they would pack layers of raw fish in a clay jar, covering each layer with salt. After a month or two, the salted tuna, known as
maleh
, was ready to eat.

“We played hopscotch and hide-and-seek. There were so many children. Arabs, Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians,
Ajam
. We played with boys, too, and went swimming in the creek,” she says, slapping her knees. But life in Dubai has grown more complex. Children spend long hours in school and study when they come home. New Islamic strictures separate boys and girls. Houses are big and far apart. Work hours are longer. Everything, it seems, conspires to keep people apart. These days, pleasure comes from shopping, not visiting neighbors. Umm Hussain tells her children about the life they’ve missed by growing up in the new Dubai.

“Before, life had a taste,” she says, rubbing her fingers as if crumbling a cracker. “Now nothing makes you happy. Before, you could buy one mobile phone and you are happy. Now you buy five mobiles in a year and you’re not happy. There is nothing making people happy now. Children have so many things in the house, but they are bored.”

Umm Hussain was raised by immigrant parents who took Emirati citizenship before it became valuable. She is a grateful and proud Emirati, but she wonders what the future holds. The trends don’t make her comfortable.

“We are afraid that one day we’re going to lose our country. We don’t say our sheikhs are doing something wrong. But we don’t know what they are planning for us. We are opening the door for everybody.

“The people coming here are buying houses and they’re buying everything. We don’t know who they are. If you were in my place you wouldn’t be afraid? This is too much. They must stop giving visas to everybody. The Indians, before they were not like this. Now they make problems. They stop the work, they sit in the road, they kick the police.

“How do you control all these people? It’s very dangerous. You’re paying for this growth. You may pay with your life. We see a big, big accident coming. The bad luck is coming to us. When you make something beautiful, everyone comes to look at it. You’re afraid of the evil eye. This is what we are saying: Stop building. Leave what we have. There’s too much building, building, building. It’s like someone sleeping on your chest. There’s no air.”

Seven months later, Umm Hussain’s wishes, and some of her fears, were realized. A big accident did come: Dubai succumbed to the global contagion. And that brought building and immigration nearly to a standstill.

In May 2008, Sharjah Radio host Mohammed Khalaf dedicated a week of his daily talk show to this debate. The program aired blistering criticism of the UAE’s leaders and shocked listeners with alarming predictions for the country’s future. Ebtisam al-Kitbi, the UAE university professor, was one of his guests. One day, Khalaf started the show by asking al-Kitbi whether she thought Emiratis might disappear.

“Is this an exaggeration or is it reality?” Khalaf asked.

“It is reality,” al-Kitbi replied in a defiant tone. “Today we face an invasion of millions of people coming to us from abroad to stay. They have no intention of leaving this country. As a result, our existence is threatened.”

Al-Kitbi spoke angrily, dismissing callers who suggested she was exaggerating. She insisted that the sheikhs were leading the country in the wrong direction. She beseeched listeners to take up the cause. “Today the locals can’t find plots of land to build their houses, while you are selling entire areas to foreigners,” she shouted. “The person responsible for this should be punished. No matter how high-ranking they are, these people should be punished.”

“I totally agree,” said Khalaf’s second guest that day, Jamal al-Bah, president of the Arab Family Organization, a group that pushes traditional values. “We have too many foreigners competing with us for work, education, even marriage. Our girls are finding it difficult to get married because of the expatriate girls. We are like a ship lost at sea. This ship was sailed by his highness Sheikh Zayed, may God bless his soul. Now we want to know where we’re heading. We need to do something before it’s too late.”

“We are pushing ourselves into a dark tunnel from which we’ll never emerge,” al-Bah said. “We sold our lands, we brought the foreigners here and gave them power over us. We built the skyscrapers and asked them to live in them. We did this to ourselves.”

The host, Khalaf, suggested the country’s leaders were more responsible than average citizens. But he steered around naming them. “We’re not the decision makers. But, I want to ask, isn’t our decision maker afraid of this? There has to come a day when he is affected by these decisions. Doesn’t he think about this matter and the seriousness of it?”

“No,” al-Kitbi blurted. “He is not aware of anything whatsoever.”

It’s unclear whether Khalaf and al-Kitbi referred to UAE president Sheikh Khalifa or Dubai leader and UAE vice president Sheikh Mohammed.

Khalaf lamented that Emiratis have no tradition of public dissent. They are outmaneuvered by foreigners, for whom speaking up is natural. Indian laborers take to the streets, marching for better wages and housing. Emiratis can’t, or won’t, do the same. Al-Kitbi said Emiratis need to start taking action to get the government’s attention.

“In one of the emirates, someone decided to build in front of a complex that was occupied by foreigners. The proposed building would block their sea view. So the foreigners decided to take action and stop this building. They succeeded, by obtaining twenty thousand signatures. Why did they get what they wanted? Because they come from countries that respect their opinions. Their leaders listen and act accordingly. We don’t have this in our culture. Our civil society is weak. We don’t have groups that defend the rights of the citizen. There is a gap between you and the decision maker.”

“I want to say this to the decision maker: You might have to pay a price for your acts tomorrow. The people will not allow this to continue,” al-Kitbi said in a challenging tone. “I hereby state that God is my witness. I have spoken up. I was not quiet about this.”

She suggested that the UAE’s rulers are allowing unlimited immigration to further their personal businesses. This, she said, is a conflict of interest. “You have to choose between being a ruler or a merchant. You cannot make money for yourself while you issue decrees.”

Khalaf announces that listeners are barraging his mobile phone with text messages. He reads one: “I am surprised that the host has not been arrested!”

Al-Kitbi is incensed. “We haven’t said anything yet! Let them arrest us. We’re not afraid because we’re speaking the truth. If the reward of someone speaking the truth is jail, let them put us in jail. I’m not afraid at all. God is there, I am only afraid of Him.”

Khalaf takes a call from an agitated Emirati man. “You are pouring salt into our wounds. You’re making us cry. I am telling you that if this situation does not change, I will leave the country in the next three years and I vow never to return.” The caller starts weeping and hangs up.

Khalaf takes another call. “I just want to tell you what an Indian man said the other day when he heard a UAE national complaining about the number of Indians here. His reply to the local was: ‘No Indian, no UAE!’” Khalaf and his guests share a few dark chuckles.