Moving Abroad: How to Read a Country When There's No Score

Les Williams

3 days ago

3 min read

MEMBER SAFETY MAP · HOW TO READ IT

You don't need all of it. You need the two things that decide it for you.

Have you read so much about moving abroad that you're more confused than when you started?

Forums. Videos. The "what I wish I'd known" threads. You know a lot. And you've decided nothing.

So here's what I tell people. You don't need all of it. You need the two things that decide it for you.

You don't need all of it. You need the two things that decide it for you.

People assume the right way to research a country is to read everything. It isn't. Reading everything is how you end up three months in with forty tabs open and no answer.

I know because I did it. In my second YouTube video, Mistake 1 is that I spent nine months planning how to leave. Nine months. Visas, boxes, flights. And I never really sat down with where.

I planned the move and skipped the question.

WATCH

Video still from Les Williams's YouTube video on five mistakes moving abroad with kids — Moving Abroad with Kids? Leaving Is the Easy Part: 5 Mistakes I Made. youtu.be/lJyapEfieqQ

Your two

Here's what I mean by your two.

SOME EXAMPLES

Say you're a mom moving with your kids. Women and Family might be your two.

A same-sex couple? Maybe LGBTQ+ and Family.

A Black professional who manages a chronic condition? Race and ethnicity, and Disability and health.

Retiring? Older movers and Money, probably.

Everything else is still there. It's just not what makes or breaks your move.

How do you find yours? Ask yourself one question.

If this turned out wrong, what would make me pack back up and come home?

That's usually one of your two. Sometimes both.

Sometimes your two isn't the one you'd pick

When I was writing my book, I interviewed women who'd built careers across borders. One of them, years into working internationally, told me pretty flatly that her identity didn't really play a role in her work. Okay. Then, maybe two questions later, she's describing how she started handing client calls over to a male colleague. Because the clients wanted to hear the answer from a man.

She didn't connect the two. I didn't point it out in the moment. But I've thought about it a lot since.

So when you pick your two, tell yourself the truth. Not the ones you wish mattered. The ones that would actually show up in a client call, or a school office, or a doctor's waiting room.

Then read them for what the law answers

Is it legal? Who has to sign off? Is something pending? What year is that number from?

A forum can't answer any of that. A statute can.

The Member Safety Map is built this way. Every entry has nine sections, and every section runs the same way: a short answer, the numbers, what it can mean for you, what isn't in yet, and the sources. So you go straight to your two, read them properly, and leave the rest for later.

GENDER

If you are a woman

IN SHORT

Strong laws on paper. Laws on the books score 83 out of 100. How enforcement is seen scores 54, a gap of nearly 30 points.

THE FACTS

83 / 100 Laws on the books

68 / 100 Services and budgets behind the law

54 / 100 How enforcement is seen

7 in 10 Women 15+ who have faced at least one form of violence in their lifetime

Scores are the World Bank's own, rounded, out of 100. We do not rate or rank countries.

Reading one section properly: the Women section of the Mexico entry.

And watch for the "not in this entry yet" line. That's where the map stops, and where you go find a qualified professional in that country.

No score. No ranking. Just what is on the books, with the sources.

The Member Safety Map, with eight country pins colored by research progress — The Member Safety Map at lwinnovations.com/map. Color shows how far along the research is. It is not a safety rating.

Free for members: four country entries that read the law as it is published, not as it feels. Mexico, Portugal, Canada and Ghana.

Mexico. Largest US-born population of any country. Deep Black and Latino/a diaspora.
Portugal. Marriage equality and strong formal protections, with real variation between regions.
Canada. Nearly a quarter of the population is foreign-born. Strong formal protections, which makes the law-versus-practice gap the whole question.
Ghana. A named destination for Black American movers, with a government program built around it. Ghana criminalizes same-sex relations, and a wider bill is still before Parliament.