Expatriates in the UAE have hit out against Forbes magazine, after the publication unjustly labelled the UAE as ‘expat unfriendly’.
Now, following outrage on social media sites such as Twitter, Forbes has doubled-back and declared the UAE as an ‘expat paradise’.
The UAE has long been a popular destination for foreign expatriates. Skilled workers often thrive in the minimal tax, high salary landscape of UAE nations such as Qatar, Oman and Dubai.
Using the #UAE FRIENDLY ‘hashtag’, a method of grouping comments from multiple user together, expats in the UAE sang the praises of their foreign home, tweeting comments like “I consider UAE my second home,” “You can’t call a country that hosts 209 nationalities unfriendly. We’ve more countries here than the Olympic,” “If UAE wasn’t a friendly country, why would people from all over the world consider it their second home,” and many more expressing similar sentiment.
Following this minor media storm Forbes published another article in which the UAE was dubbed an ‘expat paradise’.
Despite the apparent retraction, the magazine has still received criticism from organisations that seek to promote the UAE. A representative from one such organisation, Falcon and Associates, said: “It is clear that the Forbes findings are very misleading, doubtless based on the narrow methodology they chose, which has skewed findings to not be in the least representative of the reality experienced by the some 7 million expats who enjoy living in the UAE.”
