Dubai Is a Vision of the Future

Opinion|Dubai Is a Vision of the Future

This essay is part of The Great Migration, a series by Lydia Polgreen exploring how people are moving around the world today.

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 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 told me.

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.

“I worked my way to the top,” she told me, a sly smile playing across her face.

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 Gulf in search of opportunity.