World Immigration was built by two people — one who has moved countries, and one who wants to.
About the writers
Patico19 emigrated from Colombia to New Zealand. She navigated the visa process from scratch, found housing in an unfamiliar rental market, entered the New Zealand job market as a foreigner, and built a life in a country with a new culture and where she knew almost no one when she arrived. Her guides come from that experience, not from a summary of someone else’s article. They are written in her native Colombian Spanish and English, for an audience who shares her starting point.
Marshalleq is planning an interim move to Colombia with a view to decide on where to move permanently after that. He researches immigration routes, visa systems, cost-of-living data, and housing markets across many countries in order to learn about them for his own purposes and share that work with you. His guides are sourced from official government statistics, independent research and the immigration forums where people actually describe what things cost and what surprised them. When the data conflicts with received wisdom, the data wins.
Why this site exists
Both of us are planning a move back to Colombia, for Patico19, this is her home and for me this is a place I am learning to call my second home. I have lived in New Zealand all my life for various reasons and wanted to live elsewhere to experience other cultures since I was in my twenties and family commitments have held me back. But no longer, the plan is real and this site shares part of our journey with you. My dream is to get back to the ocean that my parents and grandparents shared with me as a child in the Bay of Islands, I just never dreamed the ocean could be the beautiful Caribbean Sea off the coast of Colombia – coming from New Zealand I had never clicked it could exist outside of the movies.
As we do our research on the best places to live, where the best climates are, what the jobs are like and share our personal experiences and stories, we publish them here. I have spent 30 years in IT and for my own purposes I have built my own research workflow in order to get the most accurate and timely information we can, which is all checked and rechecked personally by me and Patico19. Because I enjoy publishing and personally feel most rewarded when I can help other people, so we are sharing this research live as it is checked rather than it sitting dormant on a hard drive, unused for years.
For our reference articles we try hard to write these in a reference style as there is a lot of information that can be hard to digest if there are too many colourful anecdotes, for other articles you may see us diverge from this path.
During my research I noticed the immigration content industry has a bit of a problem. Most of what returns in search results is either government pages (accurate but bureaucratic), forum threads (useful but unverifiable and difficult to browse), or commercial sites that open with a quote form and have a vested interest in a particular country or thing. I didn’t find any site that weighed up the benefits and challenges of various countries against each other. We wanted to build something different, a site where the information comes first, sources are named, and the trade-offs are part of the article rather than edited out.
To that end, we have a contact page, if you find any information that is incorrect or you believe portrays anything in a light that it should not, please reach out and let us know. This will go directly to our email and you will likely get a personal response.
The guides are free. We aim to support our hosting fees and time to keep the articles up to date through ads and referrals, e.g. when you use an international moving company, expat health insurer, or money transfer service after reading here, some of those partners may pay us a commission, though we haven’t set that up yet. That relationship will be disclosed on the relevant pages. It does not affect what we write.
We hope you like our site and we trust you will find it useful.
Marshalleq & Patico19.
What we are not
We are not immigration lawyers or registered immigration advisers. We do not give legal or personalised advice. Visa eligibility depends on individual circumstances that only a qualified adviser can assess properly. Where we describe a visa route, we link to the official government source — the one you should apply through.