Surprisingly, what first strikes one upon landing in Dubai is not the skyscrapers going up at a dizzying pace. It is the sheer bustle of humanity.

Even in the wee hours of the morning, when larger airports like Heathrow would be fairly empty, Dubai International, or DXB as it is known to admiring locals, is thronged with thousands of tourists, businesspeople and migrant workers, a diverse array of people with equally diverse agendas, all knocking at the doors to the most famously booming city-state in the Persian Gulf. Travelers arriving at the main terminal usually meander for the better part of ten minutes through its convoluted bowels before being deposited in one of two processing organs. The first and literally higher of these is an elegant atrium organized into about 40 orderly queues leading to passport control counters manned by men and women wearing the Emirati national dress. Holders of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) passports, as well as Americans, Canadians, Europeans and citizens of a few other affluent nations, proceed directly there. At the bottom of an escalator a short distance before the atrium is a grimmer, tighter reservoir for passengers who had to apply for a visa before flying to Dubai. Here, citizens of South Asian, African and non-GCC Arab countries, as well as China and the former Soviet Union, contend with an unchanneled crowd for the privilege of receiving an entry stamp and being permitted to wait above, with the beautiful people, for final recognition of their right to enter the United Arab Emirates.

The mundane experience of Dubai passport control is instructive at a time when many are bedazzled by the speed at which capital, commodities and people whoosh around the globe, making it seem, as Thomas Friedman believes, that “the world is flat.” For all the triumphalist fixation on flows and mobility, the jagged edges of a more archaic order, carved into the grid of nationality, endure. Full text >>