City guides for people moving abroad
Five cities that keep pulling people in from somewhere else
We write about the cities where a large share of residents arrived from another country — what the place is actually like to live in, which districts newcomers gravitate towards, and where the friction usually shows up. No rankings, no scores, no sales pitch.
The guides
Where we go into detail
Each guide covers the geography, the neighbourhoods people look at first, the admin you meet in the early weeks, how you get around, and the parts that tend to wear on people. Read them side by side — the contrasts are more useful than any single verdict.
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Portugal — Atlantic coast
Lisbon
A hill city on a wide river estuary, small enough to cross on foot if your legs are willing and your shoes are sensible. English travels a long way in the centre, the light is famously good, and the pace suits people who want a European base without a northern European winter. The pinch point is housing: demand in the central districts is intense, and patience with paperwork is not optional.
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Germany — north-east
Berlin
Flat, spread out and stitched together by an unusually complete public transport network. Berlin rewards people who like space, cycling and long evenings, and it asks in return that you learn to navigate an appointment-based bureaucracy. It is a city of boroughs rather than one centre, so the neighbourhood you pick shapes your daily life more than the city name does.
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Southeast Asia — island city-state
Singapore
A city and a country at once, which makes the rules unusually clear and the geography unusually compact. Almost everything runs on the transport network, English is one of the official languages, and the systems around housing, schooling and healthcare are documented in detail on government sites. Housing sits in the premium band, and the tropical climate is a genuine daily factor.
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United Arab Emirates — Gulf coast
Dubai
A coastal emirate where most residents were born elsewhere, built along a single spine of highway and metro between the creek and the newer districts to the south-west. Residency is normally tied to sponsorship, so the job or the business usually comes before the move. Summers are severe, distances are long, and life is organised around air conditioning and the car far more than the pavement.
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Mexico — central highlands
Mexico City
An enormous capital high on a plateau, where a handful of central colonias hold most of the newcomers and the rest of the city carries on entirely in Spanish. The altitude is real and takes some adjusting to, the food culture is one of the strongest anywhere, and the trade-offs — traffic, water supply, seismic risk — are the sort you plan around rather than ignore.
Our approach
What goes in a guide, and what stays out
We keep to the things that stay true for years at a time: where a city sits, how it is laid out, how its districts differ from each other, what the transport network can and cannot do, and the kind of decisions a newcomer has to make in the first few months. That is the part most people find hardest to research, because it is scattered across forums and rarely written down in one place.
We leave out anything that goes stale between one visit to the page and the next. Rents, visa fees, salary bands, tax incentives, waiting times and eligibility rules all move, and a number that was right once is worse than no number at all if a reader plans around it. Where a decision genuinely depends on a current rule, we say so and point you at the official source for that country.
We do not rank the cities, because the ordering would say more about us than about you. A person moving for a specific employer, someone moving with school-age children and someone moving with a laptop and a lot of flexibility are solving three different problems, and each of these places answers one of them better than the others.
How we'd use these pages
Read two guides for cities you think are similar and one for a city you have discounted. The comparison usually surfaces what you actually care about — space, warmth, transport, language, or how close you are to family — faster than any checklist we could write for you.
Then take the specifics to the official sources we link, and to a qualified adviser for anything involving tax, immigration status or employment contracts.