Opinion | US, UK Are Losing Their Professionals To A City They Once Mocked |
A few years ago, a friend had the opportunity to move to Dubai, but he dismissed it outright, saying it was a "concrete jungle", "soulless", "too hot", and that he would never swap London for Dubai. However, early last year, he did exactly that. He moved to Dubai with his family, and the business he had set up there has already begun to show results. "It wasn't Dubai's sun versus London's gloomy weather," he told me recently over the phone. "It was the ease of doing business versus endless bureaucratic hassles and crushing taxes in the UK."
My friend was one of the nearly 1.9 lakh people who moved out of the UK lock, stock and barrel in 2024-25, the majority of them heading to Dubai, Qatar and other Gulf destinations. They were young entrepreneurs and salaried professionals.
Dubai, indeed, is one of those cities that divides opinion here in the West almost instinctively. To its critics, it feels soulless, a concrete jungle rising out of sand. Others recoil from its curtailed political freedoms or dismiss it as a place sustained by money and mammon-worship. And yet, steadily and relentlessly, people are moving there in waves, not for its sandy beaches and sun but for job and business opportunities
Young professionals, entrepreneurs, startup founders, consultants, investors, freelancers are all moving with their families and children. They are arriving from India, Europe, Russia, Britain and other countries. Many are fully aware of what Dubai is not. But they are equally clear about what it offers. Ambition, work, utmost ease of doing business and mobility are being redefined in the 2020s.
If you disregard the rhetoric, you will find Dubai's appeal to be remarkably practical. Safety. Order. A decent standard of living without urban chaos. Infrastructure that works. Roads that are sans potholes. Public services that function predictably. The system is free of bribery. Digital systems do what they promise. Above all, it offers a business environment that does not exhaust you before you begin.
The arithmetic is brutal and persuasive. No personal income tax. Very low corporate tax. Clear rules. Minimal bureaucratic theatre. In a world where ambition is often throttled by paperwork, Dubai offers speed. And speed, today, is a form of freedom.
It is, because setting up a company, for example, is not a long ordeal. In many free zones, a business can be registered, licensed and operational in........