The country of Qatar is unusual in many ways, but one of the most overt is that of its population of around 2.9 million

people. Only about 300,000 of those are native Qataris, while the other 2.6 million or so are

expats or migrant workers from other countries who have decided to settle in the area either temporarily

or permanently, located on a small sliver of a peninsula, sharing a land border with Saudi Arabia,

but otherwise surrounded by the Persian Gulf.

Qatar's capital and largest city is Doha, a coastal city that contains about 650,000 of the country's population.

Part of what makes Qatar so appealing to so many expats in particular, many of whom could live

anywhere on the planet, is that it's a very wealthy and well-maintained part of the world,

the maintenance performed by that other collection of

non-locals, the migrant workers. Qatar ranks fourth in the world in GDP per capita in terms of

purchasing power parity, and comes in at sixth in the world, using the nominal gross national

income per capita ranking system, according to the World Bank.

They're up near the top of the United Nations Human Development Index for the Middle Eastern

region, and they're considered to be a high-income economy based on the World Bank's

metrics for such things. So they're up there with the United States, Australia, Cyprus, Denmark, in that locals

make above a certain threshold $12,525 a year in 2019, which also means they're generally

referred to as a first world or developed country, depending on the terminology used, and in which

context that terminology is being applied.

All of which is to say that Qatar, despite being one of the smallest countries in the world in terms

of geography, they're about 80% the size of the U.S. state of Connecticut, and about the same size,

give or take, as the Gambia and Jamaica, despite that geographic

concision, they're doing okay economically, and that wealth is predicated, as is the case with

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