The Rankings Were Never Built to Answer Your Question

The question everyone asks, and the answer that doesn't hold

"Is it safe there?"

Ask that about a country and the internet hands you an answer fast. A ranking. A score out of ten. A headline that says "4th best country in the world for expats." It feels solid. It has a number attached.

Look closer at where that number comes from and it gets thinner. InterNations, the company behind one of the most cited expat rankings, says in its own published methodology that the personal safety factor "measures how safe expats feel in their respective destination" and "does not refer to actual crime rates provided by local law enforcement." Their 2026 edition drew on 7,786 people across 162 nationalities, all self-selected. It ranked 31 destinations, because a place only makes the list once at least 50 participants have answered for it. Fifty people. That's not nothing… But it's a feeling, reported by whoever happened to fill out the form, standing in for an answer about your actual life.

The United Arab Emirates ranks 4th in the world on that same 2026 list. Not fourth for safety — fourth overall, a position built on placing 1st for Expat Essentials and 1st for Career Prospects. Visas, admin, digital life, career opportunity. It's also a place where same-sex relationships are criminalized, and where race and immigration status shape daily life in ways that composite was never built to capture. Both things are true at once. A ranking assembled largely from how smoothly the paperwork went cannot hold that contradiction. It just averages it away.

If you're the default person those surveys were built around, the gap barely registers. If you're not, you're the one absorbing it… Usually after you've already booked the flight.

Who's asking, and who I am

I'm Les Williams. I'm an immigration attorney and global mobility strategist, and I built my life and career across the Middle East, the Americas, and Europe. As a Black, queer woman, in rooms and countries that weren't designed with someone like me in mind. I've practiced immigration law on both sides of relocation. Helping people get into a country, and living what it actually takes to build a life once you're there.

LW Innovations is the company I built out of that experience. The short version of what we do: help professionals and entrepreneurs turn the skills and experience they already have into work they can do from anywhere, so they can build a career and a life outside their home country that actually supports the life they want. Not just the resume.

The plainest version of why: more choice, without losing yourself in the process.

That mission runs through everything under LW Innovations. The book, the workshop, and the tool this piece is actually about.

The gap nobody's numbers are measuring

Go looking for resources on relocating or building a career abroad, and if you're not the demographic most of that content assumes, you'll still find some representation. A video here. A thread there. Pieces of yourself scattered across other people's highlight reels, never quite the whole picture.

Representation matters. It's necessary… It's just not sufficient. What's missing is something with steps in it. Something sourced, dated, and honest about what it doesn't know, instead of a score that implies more certainty than it has.

That's the specific gap I'm building a tool to close. A members' resource where you choose the lenses that actually apply to you (race, gender, LGBTQ+ status, disability, and more as we build them out) and see factual, sourced information about conditions in a given country, organized so you can make your own decision instead of borrowing someone else's feeling.

A few things it's deliberately not. It's not an alert system, not a legal service, and not a safety guarantee. Nobody can promise you a country. What it can do is put real information in front of you instead of a number with no methodology behind it.

Built to say what it doesn't know

The single most important field in the tool isn't a data point. It's the one that names what we couldn't find. Every entry says plainly where the research runs out, instead of quietly implying it's complete. That's the opposite of how most rankings work, and it's the whole point. A polished tool with no visible gaps trains you to assume an absent risk is a nonexistent one. We'd rather tell you the truth about what we don't know yet than hand you false confidence dressed up as data.

The same principle shapes what stays out of the sourced layer entirely. Anything that can't be traced to a named, licensed, reputable source, including several rankings you've probably seen cited everywhere, doesn't make it in. If a source won't say clearly how it gathers its numbers, or won't let the information be reused honestly, it's not going in front of you as fact.

Where this sits in what we're building

This isn't a separate project bolted onto LW Innovations. It's the next piece of the same throughline that started with Virtual Impact and continues into The Global Mobility Workshop. The book hands you the framework. The workshop turns it into your specific plan. This tool is what you come back to once you're actually making country by country decisions inside that plan. The reference that's still there after the two days are over.

Right now, this is a soft launch. Small, early, and honest about being early. A handful of countries are live, built by hand, checked against sources I can actually stand behind. It grows from here, including, eventually, from the people using it, since the lived experience of someone who's actually been somewhere is worth more than any dataset. That part comes later, deliberately, once the foundation is solid enough to build on.

What this means for you

If you're making a decision about where to build your life next, you don't have to choose between a feel good highlight reel and a number with no methodology behind it. You're allowed to ask for both real information and the honesty about what's still unknown. That's what I'm building toward here.

More on this as the tool grows. For now: if a ranking tells you a place is safe, ask it one question back. Safe according to whom, and measured how. Most of the time, the honest answer is "we asked some people how they felt." That's a fine data point… It was never supposed to be the whole answer.