Laos isn't making a serious bid to be an international power player. Dubai is. The standards are different. Deal with it.
If you're going to build a civilization that depends on 70% of your population being foreigners, many of them second or third generation residents who have never seen their putative homelands, and you're going to reserve the right to deport them at will or to jail them for farting, then this article makes a very cogent point:
And they will, as long as Abu Dhabi is willing to pick up the tab. Dubai made a massively leveraged bet, and now Abu has them by the short and curlies, but the UAE is still looking okay.
Dubai is not going to be fine.
In the long run, no probably not, but they (the UAE, not Dubai alone) have a decade, maybe two to get it together. They probably won't, and when it goes to hell it'll make Libya look like a tea party, but if they went to a Singaporean model with the guest workers they could be okay. Given that there are third generation guest workers they're probabably hosed, but something as simple as having a maximum residency of five years for pure labourers and recruiting men from one country for one sector and women for another from a nother country would go a loooong way to preventing people from forming real attachments.
If you're going to build a civilization that depends on 70% of your population being foreigners, many of them second or third generation residents who have never seen their putative homelands, and you're going to reserve the right to deport them at will or to jail them for farting, then this article makes a very cogent point:
Your checks sure as hell better clear.
Dubai is not going to be fine.