Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down
February 11, 2009
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For many foreigners, Dubai had seemed at first to be a refuge, relatively insulated from the panic that began hitting the rest of the world last autumn. The Persian Gulf is cushioned by vast oil and gas wealth, and some who lost jobs in New York and London began applying here.
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
A car salesman in Dubai on Wednesday sat without customers. Lack of credit and a glut of cars on the market are cutting sales.
Dubai But Dubai, unlike Abu Dhabi or nearby Qatar and Saudi Arabia, does not have its own oil, and had built its reputation on real estate, finance and tourism. Now, many expatriates here talk about Dubai as though it were a con game all along. Lurid rumors spread quickly: the Palm Jumeira, an artificial island that is one of this citys trademark developments, is said to be sinking, and when you turn the faucets in the hotels built atop it, only cockroaches come out.
Is it going to get better? They tell you that, but I dont know what to believe anymore, said Sofia, who still hopes to find a job before her time runs out. People are really panicking quickly.
Hamza Thiab, a 27-year-old Iraqi who moved here from Baghdad in 2005, lost his job with an engineering firm six weeks ago. He has until the end of February to find a job, or he must leave. Ive been looking for a new job for three months, and Ive only had two interviews, he said. Before, you used to open up the papers here and see dozens of jobs. The minimum for a civil engineer with four years experience used to be 15,000 dirhams a month. Now, the maximum youll get is 8,000, or about $2,000.
Mr. Thiab was sitting in a Costa Coffee Shop in the Ibn Battuta mall, where most of the customers seemed to be single men sitting alone, dolefully drinking coffee at midday. If he fails to find a job, he will have to go to Jordan, where he has family members Iraq is still too dangerous, he says though the situation is no better there. Before that, he will have to borrow money from his father to pay off the more than $12,000 he still owes on a bank loan for his Honda Civic. Iraqi friends bought fancier cars and are now, with no job, struggling to sell them.
Before, so many of us were living a good life here, Mr. Thiab said. Now we cannot pay our loans. We are all just sleeping, smoking, drinking coffee and having headaches because of the situation.
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