Dubai Dreams

The sense of ‘normality’ and ‘peace’ which governs the UAE is evidence of the formal strategies, which have been employed by the state to control, regulate, and maintain divisions between ‘nationals’, ‘ex-pat professionals’ and ‘labour migrants’. Social hierarchies control and dominate the majority of people living and working in the UAE, but also provide a source of national mythology to ensure that hierarchies of entitlement ad privilege benefit ‘nationals’ and exclude ‘others’. Simply put, my question is how? The UAE provides a interesting example of the types of global ideologies, which sustain the exclusion of vulnerable populations from formal protection. Examples of this are obvious through continuous ideologies that blame the economic ‘backwardness’ of Third World countries to legitimize the lesser status, payment and treatments of migrants in the UAE. This paper explores social outlooks on migrant workers from Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines to Dubai, UAE based on fieldwork in the UAE. The goal of this paper is to provide introductory insights into the social perspectives that sustain unequal relations between various migrants and citizen categories.

Keywords: Migrant Domestic Workers, ‘Hierarchies of Citizenship-Based Entitlements’, Racialization, Globalization, Labour, Exclusion, Exaltation, ‘Exception’, Temporality.