Where to find reliable information about a country

The best sources in this field are free, official and tedious. The worst are optimised to rank in search results, which is why they appear first. The distinction is worth learning once.

Primary sources

• The immigration authority's own site in the national language, which is frequently more current and more detailed than its English version.
• The legal instrument itself — the law, decree or regulation — published in the official gazette. Every rule rests on one, and reading it removes most ambiguity.
• The tax authority's guidance on residence, on the regimes for new arrivals, and on reporting.
• Your own country's foreign ministry, which publishes travel and residence advice for its citizens and has no commercial interest.
• The destination's statistics office for population, housing and price data, rather than an agency's chart.
• The land registry, where one publishes transactions — the Emirates being the useful example.

Secondary sources worth using

• The big professional services firms' country tax summaries, which are free, updated and written for practitioners.
• Court decisions, where accessible, which show how rules are actually applied rather than how they are written.
• Local press in the local language, translated, which reports problems long before international coverage does.
• Regulator and bar association registers, for checking anyone you are about to instruct.

Sources to treat carefully

• Agency blogs, which are marketing and are frequently out of date on precisely the point that changed.
• Expat forums, useful for practicalities — which bank, which neighbourhood, how long the queue is — and unreliable on law.
• Comparison sites monetised by referral, whose rankings follow commission.
• Anything undated. In this field a page without a date is a page without value.

The method

Establish the rule from a primary source. Use secondary sources to understand how it is applied. Use forums for logistics. Pay a professional in the jurisdiction for the decision. The whole research phase costs nothing but time, and it is the part people skip in favour of a consultation with someone selling something.