Zero out of a hundred for pressure on newcomers. The only such zero in the index.
red flagThe place interval 86-94 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.
Red flagOne of the three core categories, how the agencies work, pressure on newcomers or the reliability of status, has fallen below the critical mark. The score is capped: a disaster in the core is not cured by comforts at the edges.
The thin mark on each bar is the average across 97 countries
The strongest category here is Family rights: 88 out of 100, against a 97-state average of 72.2. The weakest is Pressure on newcomers: 0 against 65.2. Above the world average: 2 out of 7.
The zero appears three times: for pressure events, for the cost of losing status, and for statuses revoked retroactively. In spring 2025 more than 4,700 records were annulled without notice in the system that tracks legal students, parole already in force was cancelled, and temporary protected status was ended early for hundreds of thousands of people.
There is no grace period to find a new employer, and only a court may allow you to leave voluntarily, at its own discretion. The immigration service's own target is two months; the actual time as of July 2026 is nine to ten and a half months, five times longer than promised. Access to entry scores 24: a sponsored work visa remains the only route at scale, and since February 2026 the lottery has been weighted by salary level.
UpsideFamily scores 88, and a bank account is opened on a passport, without a social security number.
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.
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.
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.
