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The United Arab Emirates (UAE): Issues for U.S. Policy The UAE’s relatively open borders and economy have won praise from advocates of expanded freedoms in the Middle East while producing financial excesses, social ills such as prostitution and human trafficking, and relatively lax controls on sensitive technologies acquired from the West. The UAE government is authoritarian, although it allows substantial informal citizen participation and consensus-building. Its economic wealth has allowed the UAE to largely, although not entirely, avoid the popular unrest that has erupted elsewhere in the Middle East in 2011.