: In 2007, Shalu, a 33-year-old Indian, paid 50,000 rupees, or about $1,040, to an agency that shipped him to a construction job in Dubai on what was to be a three-year contract. He was laid off in December after just one year. His company told him and about 250 other workers that the work had dried up. As signs multiply of a deep downturn in the Gulf state's once-buoyant real estate market, the migrant workers India, Bangladesh and Pakistan who kept the building boom going are either being forced to return home or are having problems sending money home. Their declining remittances...
photo: WN / Guillaume Poulet-Mathis
