Could the Dubai Visa Model Work in America?

and some of these ones so guest residency without a citizenship without a citizenship path is is unacceptable i said disagree i think it's acceptable i i i said disagree although this was um i want to talk to you to you about this one but i did agree with you i said disagree yeah uh yeah you know a lot about this so why don't you kick it off yeah i mean in the the the the way that things work in the uae which includes dubai and and abu dhabi um works a lot like when it worked the best for us and uh they kind of let everybody in but they're extremely strict if you like i said if you commit a crime you're out and you're a guest and they'll kick you out if you and there's no expectation that you will you know automatically get citizenship it's a very very hard path to get citizenship uh and the other interesting thing that works really well there they have tiers um they have a thing uh called the golden visa which i have which is like the super premiere thing you you've got to have millions of dollars or know somebody and prove it and then you you get free reign like you can come and go as you you basically have almost the privileges of a local you you're not a citizen but you have this thing called a golden visa and you can buy property and open accounts and do whatever

kind of whatever you want you can come and go as you please it lasts 10 years and then they have tiers you know if you have a couple hundred thousand dollars you're pretty cool they'll let you in and if you're from america or whatever but if you come from one of these countries where you know people make eight dollars a day they have quite strict they say first of all they've you've got to prove that you can uh sustain yourself so they say you've got to show a bank account that shows that you have two grand and we're going to give you a three-month visa because we want to make sure that you're not going to you know two grand is enough to cover you for whatever three months four months or something like that and if not you need a sponsor and the sponsor's got to say that they're going to put a roof over your head and i think that that system it it works well because you have it's it's like a rising tide that lifts all boats you have people that are you know the billionaires from pakistan or the u.s or whatever that go there and they're they're benefiting and you have people from the poorest of the poor countries where they were they were in their own country they were making eight dollars a day and they go there and now they're

making eighty dollars uh every two days and they're like living the dream and then some of those people become you know after several years they become you know more senior in the you know not great jobs uh or they even become drivers or something like that and then it's like being a becoming a driver is like it's like a normal person in manchester becoming a hedge fund manager it's like 10 steps above where they were you know and um and so it's kind of like what we used to call the american dream when people would come into ellis island and they would make a better life and then and even better their kids you have their kids that are doing well well i gotta i i i i could push back let me ask one thing actually um so my understanding is that with these types of uh systems in the in the uaa specifically the people who might come in on the sort of lower tier visas are who are coming in effectively as laborers they are frequently like housed in a segregated way like they're effectively segregated from a lot of society inside of inside of dubai or the uae they're doing work they but they're not they're not and correct me i'm not saying i'm but they're mostly not mixing with like the local population to the same degree that you might be on your gold visa is that it's well

you know economics is a big part of it it's changed over time they used to have kind of these worker camps and 20 years ago there was stuff it used to annoy me these articles that would say like it's it's slavery or whatever it's not slavery it's voluntary you know they are if you can't read and you're from senegal i'm sorry but the world has not given you a great has not dealt you a great hand and and you know we can live in this fantasy land where everybody makes 25 an hour or works for a union but it these people will literally die from starvation so they're doing better when they're there so i think they were actually doing quite a humanitarian thing because they brought millions of these people here's here's one of my concerns like suppose like america has a population that's coming in and working for very cheap so and they're not allowed to vote you know like what if americans then did something about that you know like what if they gave them all the right to vote you know like we agree right we kind of had a little bit of an experiment like this at one time in our history you know well you know hopefully if they're here if they're here uh enough they you know they i mean in the uae they love the

values and in our in our place you know a lot of those those immigrants that i mentioned from uh but but the native side the native population of the uae is not it doesn't have that same like part of what makes they can't vote at all well but they but i don't i think and you can again i think you have more experience here so you really should feel comfortable correcting me but like my impression is the average western european has a much higher egalitarian instinct than the average muslim in the uae and so they're going to be way more comfortable with having a second-class citizen you know building them a house than americans are that then then sort of people of than sort of western europeans so your your fear is that people will say oh these people are i get the same answer i get the same answer but but but yes that is what to me the best argument against this or one of the best are is like well the people here people here don't like people here won't abide they do not like the idea of there being a second tier class of citizen yeah or well they're not citizens they don't like the idea of there being a second tier resident and uh and so you have you know a bunch of people here who are not citizens and that that will create a lot of discontent among the population either because

either because they think they should are more deserving or because people are jealous about the ways that those people are participating in the yeah you know in the economy and so to what degree is that you know disruptive or harmful despite the ostensible economic that's definitely a point and a lot of people on the left would probably have issues with that and make make problems i think it depends how you look at second class you know i'm not an emirati so in many ways i am second class there is definitely differences for me and a guest worker from bangladesh but they're not as much as you might think it's it's mostly economic and there are rare but there are people who work there and because now it's been going on 25 years so you have people where you know there are stories there's a guy who was you know um there's well there's a famous story in in saudi uh the bin laden family the father became a multi-billionaire he started as a truck driver um he didn't even know how to drive he barely knew how to read he started as a truck driver he he got his own pickup truck and the long story short he expanded that into a multi multi-billion dollar construction empire and you do have that in uae you have people

where they don't know how to read they learn how to read they learn how to speak a few languages they work their way up from a you know 50 a day job to a 150 a day job uh sometimes they become an uber driver then they do this or that and then they scrape together a bunch of money and they buy some little piece of property and they luck out and flip it for a triple and then they're and then you know 15 20 years later they have a 40 or 100 million dollar net worth it's rare but just like it happened in new york city with the immigrants from ireland and and um italy um you know 100 years ago it does happen it's rare but but it but but you know we're all kind of second class but but there's an opportunity for everybody to to you know increase their station it's very very hard to go from making 50 a day to 50 million um but there's a lot of people who go from making 50 a day to making eight thousand dollars a year and they're excited about it so i like the idea of lifting the the and and i feel it's very humanitarian because a lot of the people on the left would think like oh that's horrible i would never have somebody work for 50 a day it's like well you're just going to have them die then that's certainly not my that's certainly not my oh no i know yeah but to the people that

the people that you mentioned that you're concerned about who would would say that and it is a valid concern because people do a rational thing yeah well i i guess and this has sort of been a recurring area of sort of disagree disagreement or not perfect alignment um you know which is to what degree do these types of designs or systems threaten the thing itself are are are there negative externalities being created by these or risks being created by these that aren't properly priced yeah and so you're you know you're bringing in cheap labor but is there and again cheap labor is good that's not a bad word for me uh but if if uh if this is carrying some risk right that's not priced yeah you know it that's that that's that's that's not just somebody letting them letting them vote they could overthrow you exactly that's exactly what's right yes that's exactly what i'm talking about 300 guys with ak's could cause a lot of problems in in new hampshire and so if these you know is there is there resentment building for what yeah so yeah they the first the first year they're there they're happy they're making so much money from their home country the 50th year they're there you know what you know what

and there's people that have been um that have had sponsorship programs where they have used the sponsor you know there there are things there is nuance there's details and there's stuff that that that happens and there can be drawbacks i think overall something like uae works uh for the most part and that's really just a copy they just copied us it was our system i don't i don't completely it's a lot like our system was 50 years ago 100 years ago i mean yeah ellis island i don't i don't i i don't think that that's uh i don't think that that's completely true i think i think that um because we let them vote yeah yeah yeah and i think that's a really big difference but didn't wasn't it what didn't it take a lot longer to to become a real citizen of the u.s when you came over there was a time when you you don't have to own property to vote america's had a lot of different voting systems over time but that's also and wasn't the citizenship test harder sure but but this okay but this is one of the lessons of sort of american history which is make it yeah it's constantly we've been on a you know yeah all we used to be much more like this and it's it's constant it's been this constant push for egalitarianism yeah you know and so that impulse does seem to exist within the

population here maybe you can dream of some other population where that impulse doesn't exist but it