While the capital funding for these construction projects comes from trade and fiscal surplus, the labour needed to work on these projects has to be imported. The construction boom led to an increase in demand for foreign labour -known in the Gulf as "expatriates" - usually recruited from the low-wage countries of South Asia. The domestic citizens of the Gulf, or the "nationals," would simply not work for the same low wages.
(...) By 2008, unofficial estimates put the population of Qatar at 1.25 million, 80 per cent of which were expatriates. By 2008, expatriates were unofficially reported to constitute 90 per cent of the labour force in the UAE.