Today's Edition
SADEQ ALKHOORI (ABU DHABI)
Millions come to the UAE for opportunities, but many stay for something deeper and less transactional. Here, they find home: not in a single moment but through routine, repetition, and a sense of belonging that grows beyond residency. In the UAE, that process plays out at a national scale.
Official data show the UAE's population, including nationals and expatriates, reached about 11.29 million in 2024,. In Abu Dhabi, the population stood at 4,135,985 in 2024, up 7.5% from the previous year.
More than indicators of growth, these numbers highlight a society where expats play a central role in how the country functions. The UAE's leadership has always recognised its residents' contributions.
In 2022, UAE President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said the country "deeply appreciates the valued role of our residents who consider this country their second home".
In 2025, the Year of Community was framed around belonging, contribution and social connection, placing residents within the national story, not outside it.
Official messaging elsewhere has moved in the same direction. The UAE Government's platforms continue to present the country as home to more than 200 nationalities living in an environment shaped by coexistence, respect and tolerance. In practice, those ideas take on meaning as they come alive in schools, offices, neighbourhoods and public spaces.
That is close to how Sarah Thompson, a British resident, described belonging. "People often misunderstand what makes a place feel like home," she said. "It is repetition. It is where your week happens. Where your friends are. Where your children become themselves."
For many expatriates, attachment to the UAE is built on the slow accumulation of ordinary life.
Jordanian resident Lina Haddad said the connection is tied less to nostalgia than to momentum. She described the UAE as a place where things are constantly happening and where many younger expatriates connect the country to their own growth and independence.That makes the UAE more than a destination for opportunity. It becomes the setting in which adulthood, ambition and self-definition play out in real time, she said.
Others describe the bond more quietly. Elena Popescu, a Romanian resident, said home can "arrive softly", through habits, memories and the people who come to know you best. Her emphasis on calm, order, and safety points to a more practical side of belonging. People do not stay only where they can earn but where daily life becomes manageable enough to feel steady.
Joseph Mensah, a Ghanaian resident, put it differently. He said the UAE becomes home because it is where many people grew, changed, and became stronger. That idea shifts the story away from comfort alone.
A place begins to matter more deeply when it holds the difficult years as well as the successful ones, and when the life built there comes to feel dignified rather than provisional.
That emotional attachment is supported by structure. Large expatriate populations do not remain rooted in a country by sentiment alone. They do so when safety, services, mobility and social order make continuity possible, the residents said.
That is why the idea of home in the UAE can be easy to underestimate from the outside. It may not always announce itself dramatically. More often, it shows up in school runs, workdays, friendships, family rituals, weekend routines and the quiet realisation that the place where life happens is also the place where life has taken shape. For many expatriates, that is when residency becomes belonging.
