Scheme to transform a remote island into the new Dubai | Hacker News Reader

Scheme to transform a remote island into the new Dubai

theguardian.com

64 pointspmcpinto34 comments

I have often thought that for a lot of the countries in Africa (where land is in abundance, for example a place like the DRC), creating mini Singapores/Dubais/Monacos could be a viable, if ecologically disastrous, way of economic development. The potential revenue would far exceed the necessary infrastructure costs with land being free. The only thing they would have to guard against is political instability.

Economist Paul Romer has some interesting, if provocative thoughts on that idea, chiefly the idea of developing countries choosing to outsource the administration of a parcel of their territory to institutions designed and backed by more economically developed foreign powers. http://urbanizationproject.org/blog/charter-cities

Romer was covered by Planet Money a while ago: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/11/09/164813887/episo...

Not that it's a bad idea, but it does sound a bit like colonization :-p

Hahahaa. As someone who has spent a couple of years of years in the DRCongo, and comes from a colonised country (India), I am not sure how to slot this (good,bad, bit of both). I think it's probably short/medium term good , but long term bad. The ecological consequences alone suggest that it's long term bad. The only problem is that having spent a lot of time there and now knowing a lot of people from the country, I am biased towards short term good.

Can somebody help me understand why the countries where Bidoon reside are so hesitant to give them some form of documentation? State actors shopping around for citizenship for their residents just sounds so fishy. Do they not want the Bidoon in their countries? If so, can't they simply be deported?

I think some of them have lived there for decades and did not know about procedures for registering their citizenships when the country was formed. I am not sure even the Arab authorities have the political power to deport hundreds of thousands of people who were originally from their country, who have no other place to call home. And if they were going to try do it anyway, to where, Syria? I guess the foreign citizenship plan was to give these people a citizenship in the Comoros, and in exchange give the people temporary visas to stay in those Arab countries, and slowly phase them out because they don't want to share the country's bounties with these people.

According to the article the second phase of the plan was mass deportations under a pretty transparent guise. That never happened though, fortunately. I wonder if any of the Bidoon ended up in the Comoros.

Because giving them documentation would also give them rights and turn them from 'nobodies' into 'somebodies' whose numbers are sufficient to then create a political bloc with some power. Hence the attempt to make them go away.

It's exactly the same here in the US. Only a small minority of the states (10) allow illegals to get driver's licenses, for example.

It's hardly exactly the same. Bidoons are natives of those countries yet are still denied documents. (Illegal/undocumented) immigrants tend to have documentation from their home countries and have citizenship from those countries. They are not lacking in citizenship.

And it's not as if Mexico grants 'documents' to illegal immigrants to their country, nor does South Africa, nor does China, nor does...

As to the OP's Q: I think it's because conferring citizenship entitles them to benefits the government is reluctant to extend to clans/ethnicities they feel are not loyal to the ruling party.

I don't think that the Bidoon are confirmed natives of Kuwait, because if they were the designation probably wouldn't exist. The problem is that the state can't confirm, for whatever reason, that they are or are not natives, so they're not willing to take on the liability of granting them a nationality (not just citizenship) due to internal and international politics.

Im not sure it's a question of loyalty, but of old world beliefs about original nationality. When someone lacks basic documentation like papers from their country of origin, the immediate assumption is of wrongdoing even when the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the 4,000 affected families.

I doubt you can trust Wikipedia on a contentious issue like this, but according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedoon_%28ethnicity%29, Kuwait appears to treat them as illegal immigrants, and that they're hiding their true nationality.

Impressive, but at first I read this as the scheme programming language, which would have been extra impressive!

You can do that in Haskell, but it takes a truly expert level grokking of monad category theory.

Why is Dubai such a talked-up place? Buildings and Islands, sure. Anything else beyond... architecture?

Stability, low taxes, relative openness, and easy work permits right in the center of one of the very wealthy regions of the world. And the rest of that gaudily rich region of the world is known for its nastiness toward foreigners, intensely planned socialist economies, and violent volatility.

I lived there for a year, and yes this is pretty much it. Compared to the rest of the Middle East it's a very stable and open place, it's mostly on par with Western cities.

You can get a residence visa and open a company for around $20,000 which makes it an attractive option for the rich to flee from whatever oppressive regime they have at home. For Westerners the main attraction is no taxes and the glitzy lifestyle.

Wow, it is actually just 20,000 AED ($5500~) according to [1]. That's pretty neat!

1: http://www.investorvisa.ae/investor-visa/uae/

"which makes it an attractive option for the rich to flee from whatever oppressive regime they have at home."

Funny you're saying this about Dubai and the UAE in general when they're known to be one of the most oppressive regimes in the region when it comes to political freedoms.

"one of the most oppressive regimes in the region "

Oh, I forgot about all the liberal democratic regimes in the region. You must be talking about Saudi, Guitar, Jemen, ISIS, Quwait, Syria, Iran, Bahrayn.

At least get the name right first before you make your counterargument,it's Qatar not Guitar. Second, for me the UAE as a whole fits very well in the list you made and you can refer to Press Freedom Index [1] for more insight on its ranking and the overall picture there.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index

Low taxes: You basically forgo your political rights as an immigrant in exchange of this (No taxation without representation )

Stability: The price you pay for authoritarianism you get in temporary and shallow stability.

I know that Dubai/UAE may seem like a RW libertarian utopia from the outside but they still are very mean to foreigners esp poor ones and there are still very generous benefits and preferential perks for natives that immigrants can't even cross their mind to ask out of fear of retribution.

Do Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Bahrain really have "intensely planned socialist economies"? I see them more as a bunch of plutocracies, where the oligarchy makes all the money due to ties with the ruling family.

" oligarchy makes all the money due to ties with the ruling family."

Same as the Soviet Union, Red China, North Korea, Cuba, and so forth. Some people[0] mistakenly say 'socialism' for Western Europe-style social insurance, so I specified "intensely planned."

[0] http://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9650030/denmark-prime-minister...

I live in Denmark, I have a fairly good idea of what social-democracy looks like.

"Intensely planned" means something like the USSR's five-years plans, and generally comes with state ownership of all companies. As far as I know, that's not what's happening in the Middle-East.

I'm glad you understand the difference. As you can see from my link, some people are confused about what socialism is.

You need a special personal connection to the insider elites to run major companies in most of the Middle East. The decisions about economic initiatives and major industry are made by a small politbureau, though it isn't called that. A privileged class controls vast wealth and power over the lives of subjects for personal pleasure, though it may or may not be in their own personal names, just like under Communism.

Location, location, location!

First, Dubai is geographically perfectly positioned to be an airline hub between Europe, much of Asia (particularly India), Africa and Australia, which is why Dubai is the world's biggest airport for international flights and Emirates is well on its way to being the world's biggest airline.

Second, Dubai is right next to Iran, which is a large, moderately wealthy country blocked off from a large chunk of the world by sanctions. Guess where a huge part of Iran's legal and less legal trade goes through? Dubai.

It's in a desert and way too hot to be comfortable most of the year. I don't understand why anyone would want to be in Dubai except for the money/lifestyle.

I can understand the argument made for Dubai being a viable and intuitive hub connecting Europe with Asia and Australia but connecting Africa with Europe, it lacks the strategic location advantage to make it viable.

The other point you raised is more of condemnation not praise of the city as it promotes and engages in shady activities like money laundering not only with Iran but with other entities and organizations.

By the way the whole Dubai bubble or project is financed by someone else's credit card. If it weren't for Abu Dhabi, the bigger sister emirate, bail-out package during the financial crisis, the whole emirate would have gone belly up and disappeared afterwards. [0]

[0]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-16/dubai-roll...

First thought: will they be using Guile, Chicken, or Racket?

and second thought there; bizarre scheme .. is that a new one?

It uses < > instead of ( ) so the code in it looks sorta like half-finished XML document.

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