How Qatar built the stadiums for the World Cup? Well, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMqLDhl8PXw

Disclaimer: Qatar is a terrible place when it comes to treatment of migrant workers. The following is not meant as a defense of Qatar. It is meant to correct one particular thing that most reporting gets wrong.

The part where it talks about 6500 migrant worker deaths over the decade of World Cup facility construction has a serious error. It fails to look at the death rate.

Qatar has around 2 million migrant workers, and the 6500 deaths are all deaths of migrants in the country rather than just work related deaths. 6500 deaths over 10 years in a population of 2 million is a death rate of 32.5/100k/year.

A death rate of 32.5/100k/year should raise questions, especially if we assume that migrant workers in Qatar skew younger, but the question should be why is it so low?

For comparison the death rate for 15-24 year old males in the US is 100/100k/year, and for 25-34 year old males it is 177/100k/year.

It's possible that Qatar's poor treatment of migrant workers does result in an unusually high job-related death rate but something else Qatar does results in an unusually low death rate when not at work with the net result being the overall death rate is low.

In the US the top causes of death of young males are poisoning (which includes drug overdoses), suicide, automobile accidents, and homicide.

Qatar is very anti-drug, with harsh penalties and almost no tolerance, giving them a drug death rate around 4% of the US drug death rate.

They are also much more intolerant of drunk driving, which is a major contributor to automobile deaths in the US. In Qatar if there is any detectable alcohol in your blood after an accident you are considered to have been drunk driving. That threshold is so low that you would be considered drunk if you were in an accident in the morning and had one drink the night before. Also I'd expect that most migrant workers use some other form of transport most of the time.

Their homicide rate is also very low.

Are those enough to offset a high work-related death rate. I don't know. I should know because all of the articles I've seen talking about migrant worker deaths in Qatar should have looked into this.

Increasingly seems like they're coming from East Africa too, although it appears it may be at the behest of the government in some cases.

https://africanarguments.org/2024/03/go-gulf-is-ethiopia-sac...

Or the absolutely rampant corruption. Their entire way of doing business is to lie, cheat and steal, and then murder anyone who objects or tries to report on it.

Bluntly, I hope nobody comes to their aid when oil ends and their economies inevitably collapse - they can go back to bashing each other on the heads with rocks in the desert, and stop destroying the whole damned planet for a quick buck.

Unfortunately, this is the outcome when you turn tribal hunter-gatherers into billionaires overnight. The scum always rises to the top in a society built on dominance and violence.