If by folks, you mean straight men... because I sure as hell wouldn't consider moving if I was gay or a woman. Just this week Ireland had to pressure UAE to return an Irish woman who authorities imprisoned for "attempting suicide" after she was injured because of domestic violence.
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2024/07/10/dubai-drops-at...
Straight men account for a large portion of workforce. So might not be a bad strategy for UAE / SA to lure those.
My cousin worked there quite a while back so things may have moved on but 2 experiences he told me where reasons I wouldn't ever work there.
1. His wife was involved in an accident with an immigrant worker. She was fine, they weren't. She tried to insist on the Dubai police calling an ambulance. They flatly refused as they didn't value the immigrant workers life and threatened her with arrest and jail if she didn't leave immediately, on the basis if she hadn't been in the country the accident wouldn't have happened.
2. They and their other friends had pacts that if either couple both died they would immediately take their children out of the country, as otherwise they became wards of the state, which is almost impossible to reverse.
Corruption is rife too but the cultural differences and consequences are if anything more significant.
They are essentially on the right trajectory.
About that same time another UAE (Nahyan) shaykh demonstrated his displeasure to a business partner by having him driven into the desert, buried up to the neck, and (nonfatally) run over with a Range Rover while being videotaped. When that business partner (an American) attempted to press charges, the Shaykh was acquitted and the businessman convicted in absentia for blackmail.
I've had more issues and fewer legal recourses with Gulf clients and partners than anywhere else in the world (including the Bilad al-Sham/Levantine region of the Mideast), while doing less work with them than almost anywhere else, so I'll admit to being biased, but it really is a region where the rule of law is, depending on the context, highly personalized or outsourced to religious authorities, and presented without any of the procedural due processes you're used to.
Thus Singapore, Dubai, 1900s Hong Kong, 1800s America are some of the most famous examples. Free market with no social services doesn't really exist much anymore so most the remaining examples of open borders are something approximating dictatorship, except maybe Argentina(in practice they have almost no enforcement of immigration).
*In theory