Most Anti-Dubai Article That I Have Seen

In Australia's The Age: Dubai's rags-to-riches miracle built on the toil of exploited foreign workers

[The laborers] live in a slum called Sonapur, hidden in the dunes between Dubai and Sharjah. Without Sonapur, Dubai's architectural bling, its spas and tax-free splendour probably wouldn't exist. It's a Middle Eastern Soweto, where as many as 500,000 foreign labourers — mostly illiterates from the impoverished rural villages of the subcontinent — that build Dubai are housed in some of the most depressing conditions I've witnessed. Its a Hogarthian dystopia that should shame Dubaians, if they knew much about it. Or cared...

Its wretched sprawl of workers' filthy dormitories is an anonymous slum hidden from the Dubaians whose apartments its residents built. The best way to find Sonapur is to follow one of the worker buses that shuttle between Dubai's many building sites. About 90 minutes later, you'll be deposited in a sand-swept plain of four-storey dormitories sprawled as far as the eye can see, punctuated by the occasional provisions store selling ghee, naan and curry powders. Dubai gleams with world-class infrastructure but Sonapur didn't get much of it. Many of its roads are gravel and sand with no kerbing and few footpaths. Open sewers are common...

It is almost as if Dubai's employers have scanned the world and zeroed in on the poorest 20 nations to staff their projects. Promised riches but paid salaries well below the poverty line, they've been found jobs by unscrupulous middlemen charitably described as "employment agencies" who wouldn't have been out of place in 1780s Atlanta.