The poverty,rising population and social inequality in the Philippines have made the country one of the chief exporters of human labor worldwide with some eleven million Filipinos working abroad. More than two million Filipino live and work in the often harsh conditions of the Gulf region and some 700,000 can be found in the United Arab Emirates. This interdisciplinary and bi-directional paper will first provide a brief introduction and historical background to the Philippine labor migration in the Gulf region and then focus on the Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) diaspora in the UAE, examining the motives for their migration, their work and living conditions, the social structure,both formal and informal, the religious life, and cohesion of their community within that country. Their human rights and gender inequality situation will also be assessed. In the second part of the paper the political entitlements of the diaspora community will be examined, in particular their rights of representation and democratic participation as Philippine citizens, along with the diplomatic efforts exerted on their behalf by the government in Manila. The third part of the paper will deal with the reverse aspect of the issue by focusing upon the Filipino diaspora's impact upon the host country of the United Arab Emirates in terms of economic, social, cultural and security factors. It will also analyze the religious and legal constraints which the host country imposes upon the Filipino diasporic community within its state borders. The United Arab Emirates, along with several fellow Gulf Arab countries, constitute a remarkable example of a state where multiple diasporic labor communities co-exist relatively smoothly in the setting where the national citizens are in a rather small minority. Only about 15% of the UAE population of ten million consist of Emirati nationals, while the demographic profile is dominated by large Indian and Pakistani labor diasporas. The theoretical approach which will be adopted in this paper will in part utilize the concept of 'island communities', coined by the American historian Robert Wiebe during the late 1960s. The paper will also explore the distinction between the 'temporary diasporas', such as the Filipino labor migrants, and the 'permanent diasporas', of overseas minority communities, the members of which are either citizens or permanent residents of their host countries.