Amnesty International documents detentions during raids without document checks, and legal residents of Haitian origin are caught up in them.
By law the path to residency is predictable: the work route has no income threshold, family members join with no income threshold, permanent residency comes after 5 years, dual citizenship is allowed, and there are no language or integration exams for residency. The bottleneck is entry: employers must keep at least 80% local staff, and there is no visa for remote work.
Delivery is slower than promised. The DGM standard is 90 calendar days, while practitioners report 4-8 months, and few get through without a lawyer. The state does not publish refusal statistics.
The backdrop is the largest deportation campaign in the region. More than 276,000 people were expelled in 2024 and 119,003 in January-April 2025, up 71%, with a government quota of 10,000 a week. The campaign targets irregular stay, but Amnesty International and NYU's human rights centre document detentions in raids without checking migration status, raids in public hospitals since April 2025, detention of pregnant and breastfeeding women despite explicit legal protection, and deportation without a written order. Legal residents are caught too, and people are stopped based on appearance (details in the passport section). For other groups of legal foreigners no campaigns are documented, and we found no systematic revocation of valid residencies.
Work-based status is fragile. The law lets you stay while the activity behind your residency continues; there is no time to find a new job, and the DGM sets the deadline to leave at its discretion. You can change employers from inside the country, but with a new contract and an updated file. A spouse on family residency may work only with a separate DGM authorisation.
Daily life has friction with banks: even non-residents can open an account, but banks ask for a reference letter from your bank, 1-2 years of tax returns, 3-6 months of statements, apostilles and translations. There is no address registration; state schools are free and teach in Spanish.
The index score ignores nationality. This is what changes for citizens of specific countries.
Visa-free entry for tourism with a tourist card. For residency, the same consular visa and DGM file as for everyone.
A documented practice of racial profiling in migration enforcement applies to them: detentions in raids without document checks also hit legal residents. The general picture on this page does not apply to them.
Visa-free entry for tourism with a tourist card. For residency, the same procedure as for everyone.
Visa-free entry for tourism with a tourist card. When we checked in August 2026 we found no routes closed by nationality; residency requires the same consular visa and file as for everyone.
A visa is required to enter: the Dominican Foreign Ministry's consular list puts Belarus among countries not eligible for the tourist card. We found no residency routes closed by nationality.
The place interval 51-67 shows where the country lands when the data is nudged and the index is recalculated. One place of difference in the table means nothing; a difference of a league means something.
The thin mark on each bar is the average across 97 countries
The strongest category here is Family rights: 72 out of 100, against a 97-state average of 72.2. The weakest is Agency processing: 45 against 48.7. Above the world average: 3 out of 7.
All 97 states are calculated for one applicant: 35 years old, income of $2,500 and $3,856 a month before tax, passport not counted, the most accessible route that is actually in use.
Your passport, your income and your family do not change the table. They change which of its lines apply to you. A different income makes entry read differently, a family makes the family category read differently, and your passport makes everything read differently.
The DGM standard for work residency is 90 calendar days, 4-8 months in practice. You need a consular visa first, and after approval the residence card takes up to 45 working days under the regulations.
Not through the work route. The real options are rentista status with proven passive income of $2,000 a month or more, or RT-9 with a bank letter for RD$300,000; there is no digital nomad visa.
File fee RD$14,000, medical exam RD$6,300 per adult, renewal RD$7,000, plus a mandatory guarantee policy with an unpublished price. Entry for a family of three is about RD$58,800 without the policy, visas and renewals.
Yes. Work residency lasts while the job does, the law gives no time to find a new one, and breaching the conditions can lead to cancellation and deportation. A separate risk is raids in which documents are not always checked.
You apply for permanent residency 45 days before completing 5 years of temporary residency. Citizenship comes after 2 years of permanent residency, with a general culture exam and an interview in Spanish; dual citizenship is allowed.
For legal residents the law is predictable and offers a short path to citizenship, but agencies are slow. A sweeping campaign against irregular migration also catches people living there legally, above all based on appearance.
97 states, 26 indicators, seven categories, 2,522 scores. Every score has a source and a source class: primary means the texts of laws and government portals; reliable secondary means reports by international organisations, tax reviews by audit firms and specialist legal publications; weak means community posts and single secondary sources. The classes add up to a confidence level for the country, and a country with low confidence gets neither a score nor a place.
Every indicator is scored against a fixed ruler, not against its neighbours. Adding new countries therefore does not move the old ones, and a change in a score means a change in policy and nothing else.
A high place does not mean a good country. It means one thing: the state machine treats newcomers predictably and by the rules. Living there may be expensive, dull or hot; that is not our question.
Checked 01/10/2026. Facts come from the country's index card and official websites.
We make mistakes and we will go on making them: policy changes faster than any database. Our answer is not a pose of infallibility but a visible trail of corrections. Every correction is published: what it was, what it became, the source and the reason for the error. The corrections log opens with the second issue, together with the first block of changes.