patrick888

I am not OP but I have lived in Dubai for four years so I can offer some insight into this. Whilst it is true that some jobs in Dubai have very low pay, describing it as a "legal slave culture" is inaccurate. Articles by publications such as Vice hugely exaggerate the situation and focus soley on the extreme cases because that gets them more page views than a balanced, nuanced assessment.

Life for low-paid migrant workers is hard, without a doubt, but they can save up money to send home to their families and everyone is legally entitled to one day off a week plus paid vacation each year.

There is definitely a long way to go with regards to improving labour rights. I would like to see the government introduce a minimum wage for a start. UAE is still a developing country and, at only 41 years old, still has improvements to make.

Definitely get out of the airport. You can get into the city in 20 minutes by taxi or metro and there are dozens of top-class Arabic and Indian restaurants.

Vice would have you believe that every labourer in Dubai is a slave. I, too, work on construction sites and I know that most of the guys work very hard for not much money - that does not make them slaves though. Every time a Dubai thread comes up on Reddit, you get comments about Dubai being built by slaves. I know that abuses of employees does sadly still occur but the extent is exaggerated. That is no excuse, of course, and any instance must be eradicated. Things have improved in the last 5 years since the introduction of new laws and increased inspections.

Sex trade trafficking is definitely a problem, as it unfortunately is in many wealthy countries. The cops are trying to stamp it out though, to be fair, as I point out with the links in this comment.

You are correct that money laundering is huge in Dubai. And don't forget the sanctions-evading couriers getting money into Iran. There is a reason Dubai's main source of income is financial services (and not oil, contrary to popular belief).

What steps does the US government take to ensure that the children being trafficked into the country have not been kidnapped from their families?

the TL;DR answer to your question is that the US really doesn't do very much at all to ensure that, because it doesn't consider kids sold to orphanages for international adoption to be trafficked in the first place.

This strikes me as a huge loophole. If someone wants to import slaves, they just do it through an orphanage and it is "legitimate". It is almost like slave laundering.