Zero out of a hundred for pressure on newcomers. The only such zero in the index.
red flagOnce you are through the selection, much works smoothly: only 2.1% of filed H-1B petitions were denied in FY2025, the family gets visas together with the worker with no income threshold, free public school is open to any child regardless of status, and a bank account opens with a passport and an address. There are no language or integration exams for living there. The main filter comes earlier: the lottery and the sponsor.
Pressure on legal residents is now the strongest in our sample. In spring 2025 more than 4,700 international student records in SEVIS were terminated without notice and restored after lawsuits. In April 2025 hundreds of thousands of people who had entered legally through the CBP One app received letters telling them to leave, and about 900,000 lost their status; on 31 March 2026 a court ruled the procedure unlawful, and on 21 April DHS restarted the terminations under a corrected procedure. Temporary protected status was ended early for hundreds of thousands, and student visas already issued were revoked.
Rules change on the fly. Since 30 October 2025 work permits are no longer extended automatically, so working spouses lose the right to work in the gap between renewals. The $100,000 fee was introduced by proclamation with two days' notice and lasted nine months until a court struck it down. Since 11 April 2025 every foreigner aged 14 or over must register, carry proof and report a change of address within 10 days or face fines or criminal penalties.
If you lose your job, there is a grace period of up to 60 days, but at the agency's discretion, not as of right. Voluntary departure is also discretionary, granted by a judge or DHS, and in 2025-2026 detention of former legal residents stopped being an exception. Changing employers is easier: you can start with the new one once its petition is filed, and with a renewal filed on time you can stay up to 240 days awaiting the decision.
A worker's spouse on an H-4 visa cannot work by default: a permit comes only after the first green card stage is approved, usually years later. For people born in countries with long queues, the road to a green card can stretch over decades.
The index score ignores nationality. This is what changes for citizens of specific countries.
Since 1 January 2026 entry is fully suspended for nationals of 19 countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Burma, Syria, Somalia, Haiti and Laos, and for holders of Palestinian Authority travel documents, and partly suspended for 20 more, including Cuba, Venezuela and Nigeria. The general picture on this page does not apply to them.
They have their own work visas that bypass the H-1B lottery: TN for Canada and Mexico with no cap, E-3 for Australia (10,500 a year), H-1B1 for Singapore and Chile (6,800).
The employer-sponsored green card queue is counted by country of birth and stretches over decades for them.
Ukraine is not on the list of 39 countries facing entry restrictions since 1 January 2026. For work, the same route as for everyone: H-1B through a sponsor and the lottery.
Neither country is on the list of 39 countries whose nationals have faced full or partial entry suspension since 1 January 2026. The E-2 investor visa is not available to them: neither is a treaty country.
The 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.
First the annual H-1B lottery, then the petition: 2 months by USCIS's goal, 9-10.5 months in practice in 2026, or 15 working days for $2,965. Then an in-person consular interview, with months-long waits in many countries.
Practically no: there is no remote work or self-employment visa. Without a sponsor you are left with investment from $800,000, the gold card from $1 million, or the O-1 visa for extraordinary ability, which also needs a petitioner.
H-1B fees, from $2,030, are paid by the employer. The mover pays the green card stage fees: $1,440 per application for everyone aged 14 or over, and about $6,100 for a family of three including work and travel permits.
Yes. After a layoff, the grace period of up to 60 days is discretionary, and in 2025-2026 the government cancelled statuses already granted on a mass scale; courts have ruled some of those cancellations unlawful.
An employer-sponsored green card realistically takes 5-8 years from arrival, citizenship another 5, 10-13 years in all. You need basic English and the civics test: since 2025, 20 questions from a pool of 128, with 12 correct to pass.
In 2025-2026 the government is running its harshest immigration campaign in decades, and it reaches legal residents: status cancellations, social media checks, mandatory registration. Once you are through the selection, daily life and family rights work well, but status has become far less secure.
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.