The Communities Who Built Dubai and Abu Dhabi | LABUSA Travel

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The Communities Who Built Dubai and Abu Dhabi

Two cities where nearly nine in ten people came from somewhere else

LABUSA Travel / August 11, 2026 / United Arab Emirates, Travel Tips

What this page is

The framework item this fills is about diaspora and reconnection, and in the Gulf that means the opposite of what it means in West Africa. Nobody left here. Everybody arrived, in enormous numbers, within living memory.

Emirati citizens are a small minority in their own country, by most estimates around one in ten. The overwhelming majority of the people you meet, in the hotel, the taxi, the restaurant, the museum, the construction site and the boardroom, are not Emirati. Nothing about these cities makes sense until you know that.

Who is here

  • South Asians are by far the largest group: Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Nepalis and Sri Lankans, across construction, transport, retail, hospitality, healthcare, finance and the professions. Indians alone are a larger population than Emiratis by a wide margin.
  • Filipinos, in hospitality, retail, healthcare, aviation and domestic work.
  • Other Arabs, from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Palestine and Yemen.
  • Iranians, with a trading presence on this coast going back generations, and whose merchant families built the Bastakiya houses at Al Fahidi.
  • Africans, from Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and elsewhere, in trade, services and increasingly in business.
  • Western expatriates, a small, visible minority in finance, energy, aviation, education and media.

This is why the food is what it is, why English is the working language, and why Dubai in particular feels like nowhere else.

Labor, stated plainly

Most of this migration is temporary contract work, and conditions for low-paid migrant workers in the Gulf have been the subject of sustained international scrutiny, particularly in construction and domestic work. The UAE has made legal changes, including to the sponsorship system, wage protection and to the rules on changing employer, and rights organizations continue to assess how far practice has followed law.

This page states no figure and settles no argument, because both are contested and a travel guide is not where they get adjudicated. What a visitor can do is know the question exists, read something current rather than a decade old, and treat every person they deal with as a person.

Older connections

Trade across this water is ancient. Dhows carried goods and people between the Gulf, India, Persia and East Africa for many centuries, and the wharfage on Dubai Creek is still doing it. That traffic included the Indian Ocean slave trade, and descendants of enslaved East Africans form part of the population of every Gulf state. It is a quieter and far less told history than the Atlantic one, and it is present here.

For Black and Muslim travelers

Both cities are comfortable for Black travelers by most accounts, and Black professionals, students, business travelers and tourists are unremarkable in daily life. There is a large and long-established African business community in Dubai in particular, much of it trading through the same creek and the same souks.

For Muslim travelers it is straightforward in the way only a Muslim-majority country is: prayer rooms everywhere including in malls and airports, halal by default, and the call to prayer setting the rhythm of the day.

Visiting well

Eat in the neighborhoods rather than only on the waterfront. Take the abra and walk the wharfage. Ask the person serving you where they are from, which people are almost always glad to be asked, and listen to the answer. And do not mistake the polished surface for the whole city, because the more interesting one is half a mile inland.

Planning with LABUSA Travel

We build UAE itineraries that include the city people actually live in, not only the one in the brochure.

Sources

Plan Your Trip to the UAE Return to the Dubai and Abu Dhabi Travel Guide