Curious country, the United Arab Emirates.

Expatriates … foreigners, that is … have far outnumbered Emiratis here for a while now, but the ratio continues to climb. Only a handful of countries in the world have more expatriates than citizens, and the UAE and Qatar seem to lead the way.

According to numbers provided by the National Statistics Bureau, actual citizens of the UAE now make up only 11.5 percent of the population here, which overall is up to 8.3 million from 5 million in just five years — a startling climb of more than 60 percent in half a decade.

How do the expatriates break down, by the numbers?

A reporter at The National made calls to several embassies in the country, and here are some estimates of how many of nationals, by country of origin, are living in the UAE:

India – 1.75 million

Pakistan – 1.2 million
Bangladesh – 700,000
Philippines – 610,000

Sri Lanka – 238,000

China – 200,000

Nepal – 125,000

Great Britain – 100,000

United States – 40,000

Clearly, we’re missing some people here, if the UAE population estimate of 8.3 million is correct. (And it is an estimate; no formal census, as we know them in the U.S., has ever been done here.) Even when we add in the 947,997 Emiratis the statistics bureau claims, we have accounted for only about 6 million people.

We know a significant number of Indonesians live here. Maybe as many as 500,000. That would be the biggest chunk unaccounted for.

It would not surprise me to learn that the numbers for India, Pakistan and Bangladesh all are higher than their embassies suggested.

Also, we have no numbers here for various First World countries such as Canada and Australia, nor for South Africa … and no numbers for mostly Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Oman and Lebanon, which have a significant presence here, and none for Afghans, Palestinians and Ethiopians, who also are here in some numbers.

So, yes, we could have 8.3 million people living in a country with a land area slightly greater than South Carolina (which has 4.6 million people).

The UAE population is heavily urbanized; a large majority of people here live within a few miles of the Gulf coast, from Abu Dhabi north through Dubai to Sharjah. Most of the UAE’s land mass is empty desert in the interior.

The National fairly often quotes Emiratis who are concerned about being outnumbered in their own country. That is understandable, particularly when the proportion of actual citizens here continues to shrink.

But those 7.3 million foreigners are indispensable to the society here, providing the labor for the ambitious building and infrastructure projects, as well as for the well-developed service sector and the experts who help run many ministries and businesses. The UAE would not be the same without them. Maybe not worse off, but certainly not the country it is today.

The UAE could do something about the “citizens vs. foreigners” issue were it willing to naturalize long-term residents, but the country so far has shown no will to do that. Foreigners who have lived here for decades very rarely are allowed to become citizens and gain access to the wide variety of benefits for nationals.

This is one of the most diverse populations in the world, but the UAE is not really a melting pot — nearly all the foreigners will be leaving, eventually, not like in the U.S. or Canada, where most immigrants seem to end up staying.

When expats are no longer working, they must exit the country, usually within 30 days. That can cause for some strange situations involving two or even three generations of resident aliens who must leave a country in which some of them may have lived for 20 years. No job? No work visa. No right to stay.

Citizens of the UAE remain overwhelmingly Emirati. On the rare occasion when citizenship is given to an expat, that individual is usually an Arab from a nearby country.