“I realize I’m late to the party: Dubai is long past its media moment. The flurry of breathless write-ups—in Sunday travel sections and glossy lifestyle magazines—has come and gone.” Thus began Seth Stevenson, writing on January 8 in Slate about his own trip to Dubai. It’s true that the celebration of Dubai as the latest, greatest spawn of globalization has reverberated through the U.S. media in recent years—Indoor skiing!No taxes!

A “safe” holiday in the Arab world! From Nick Tosches’s 10,000-word gonzo romp through the emirate last summer in Vanity Fair to Thomas Friedman’s repeated invocation on the New York Times op-ed page of the city-state as the “decent, modernizing model” for the rest of the Arab world, Dubai has been drilled into our consciousness as, variously, the Oz-Vegas-Singapore of the Middle East.

What dimmed Dubai’s media star was the release last November of a scathing report by Human Rights Watch on the medieval plight of the half-million migrant construction workers who provide the cheap labor that the boom in Dubai and the rest of the United Arab Emirates demands. Those workers—mostly poor, illiterate men from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka—take on crushing debt to get to Dubai on the promise of earning good money, only to find themselves trapped in dangerous jobs, without their passports (which are routinely confiscated by their employers upon arrival for the duration of their one- to three-year contracts), and with their promised wages dramatically reduced and often withheld for months at a time. They live in squalid employer-run labor camps and are forced to work in temperatures that can exceed 130 degrees. As a result, according to the report, hundreds of construction workers die each year in the UAE under unexplained circumstances, and there is evidence that more—perhaps as...

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