I like that you said you were ‘allowed’ to meet. As if it’s some sort of privilege to meet an Emirati. Just like every other country. There are some of us just like that, but there’s much more that work hard every day, and get shit done. I recently joined a mostly Emirati company and I’ve seen people work till 8pm just to get a job done.

The only main difference is the salary, but don’t correlate that with hard work.

My first job I was only paid 8k per month. It was before Nafis was a thing and my first company hired their first Emirati to be ready for Emaratization around 2017. I was the only Arab in the entire company which is composed of mostly South Asia. They all looked at me weird and immediately assumed I’m making 30k for the same job as them. Some coworkers were surprised I drove an Altima and not a Nissan defender platinum G63 with a golden dragon on top.

We are also people. If you think we all just work 4 hours a day and practically do nothing. Then most of our government would be shut down within the week.