This is an excerpt from a Lonely Planet guidebook.
Though officially treated equally, there’s clearly a pecking order among the Peninsula’s expats. At the top of the order are the Westerners. For the hundreds of thousands of Western expats, life is a tax-free merry-go-round, usually with rent and annual airfare home included in generous packages. The life, at least in the big Gulf cities, includes sun, sea, sand and a good social life: a lifestyle few could afford back home.
Next come the middle-income workers from the other Middle Eastern countries. Their first and foremost preoccupation is to save money. Typically these expats stay just long enough to stockpile enough dollars to build a house back home and send their children to college. In some countries such as Egypt and Yemen, remittances, from nationals working abroad constitute the backbone of the economy.
Languishing at the bottom are the laborers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. While a minority (around 5-10%) enjoy a standard of living similar to the Western and Peninsula communities, the majority are manual laborers. Though working conditions are tough – digging roads in 45 degree heat or working on building sites that lack any safety provisions – many prefer this to poverty back home. Often a single laborer can support his entire extended family in his home country form his monthly pay packet. Some Asians remain on the Peninsula for up to 20 years, only seeing their families for 2 months once every 2 years. Wealth is highly relative it would seem.
