The visa run experience:

So that time has come again for me and probably at least another dozen or so people that are on the same flight as I am: We are forced to leave the country for a certain amount of time in order to get a new tourist visa. We are not skirting the system by doing this, it is just part of our lives. We get 90 day tourist visas consecutively over the course of sometimes, many years (for me I have been doing it in Vietnam for 4 years.) Basically, you wake up early, get to the airport, go through the terrible system that is bascially every single airport I have ever been into in the world, then emerge on the other side. For me and other people who are able to go between two cities that have multiple flights per day, this can normally mean that they turn right back around and do the process again and just go back right from where they started from in the same day.

This is something that is a topic of discussion among the expats on a regular basis because the entire process feels extremely pointless since the government and Immigration officials on both sides of this experience are very aware of what we are doing. They are not idiots. They know that we are not actually tourists and since we register our addresses as is required by law here in Vietnam they know exactly where to find us and if they check, they can see that we aren’t actually going anywhere or doing anything that could be considered a tourist activity. If they looked at my records they would see that I have been at the exact same address for nearly 3 years. This isn’t exactly the sort of thing an actual tourist would be doing.

So suffice to say the government knows that me and tens of thousands of other digital nomads are living in Vietnam, yet they force us to do this process 4 times a year. If you find yourself asking “why?” then join the club, because I have no idea.

I do have a few theories though:

At least in Vietnam, they are extremely lax about foreigners working in this country provided that it is within a certain industry. Korean tourism for example, employs TONS of Koreans and most of them work here without work permits. The process of obtaining a work permit is very time-consuming and expensive so most of the business owners and managers simply pay someone off in the government to look the other way. I have no proof of this happening because corruption tends to hide out of the public eye. However, there is really no other explanation because the businesses are not hidden in some shady back alley, they are in prime locations in this, and many other cities in Vietnam. If they wanted to have a look, the Ministry of Labor could simply walk in the door and immediately see that almost all of the people working there are not Vietnamese. They simply do not care because these are jobs that cannot be done by a vast majority of Vietnamese people. I’m not saying there are zero Vietnamese people that speak Korean, but there aren’t very many or at least in any meaningful capacity such as the fluency that would be required.

Therefore this leaving of the country every 90 days is simply meant to frustrate people into legitimizing their employment. It isn’t that big of a deal to have to get on a flight once every 3 months but for someone that is working, it can be a pain for the employer as well as the employee. Also, every now and then and this seems to be especially true for Koreans, the 3 month visa will be denied so then they have to enter on the 45-day visa exemption. The idea here is that after a certain amount of time the business owner and the employee will eventually legitimize their employment and get a work permit and a residency card. I guess they did the math and figured out that it would be more expensive to make some sort of task force to raid the offices which would simply just go underground if this sort of thing were to start to happen.

For someone like me, I don’t really even have an office and my employer doesn’t even have one here. My office is wherever I want it to be and mostly, it is a desk in my living room with Nadi near my feet. I’ve just chosen to do this in Vietnam because it is an inexpensive and safe country to live in. In my situation, there is no chance of me getting a work permit because I am not employed by any Vietnamese company. So in this regard we could say that Vietnam is halfway embracing digital nomads but it would be nice if they had some other sort of visa available to us.

In the past Americans were entitled to 1-year visas but for reasons that were not announced that was done away with. Even when you had this 1-year visa though, you were still required to leave the country every 90 days and it was 4x as expensive as the 90 day visa. The only real benefit of this visa was that you only had to apply for it once a year and it was multiple entry meaning that you could pop in and out of the country for a full year. They way it works now I get 90 days but if I decide to leave before the 90 days are up, I cannot come back until I have applied for another visa.

So us in the expat community don’t really understand why it is that they make us go through this but one conclusion that I have come to is that we as expats tend to overestimate our worth to this country. Sure the average expat tend to be financially much better off than the average Vietnamese person, but in the grand scheme of things such as when considering GDP or something like that, we are a relatively inconsequential part of overall society. We tend to look at ourselves and say “why don’t they want us to spend money here?” but even if there are 50,000 expats like me in this country, which there probably is, that doesn’t really amount to a huge amount of tax revenue. In a way, we actually could be pushing UP the prices for the local population. I know that is the case in my particular neighborhood where there is a near 0% Vietnamese population and the condos are some of the most expensive anywhere in Da Nang. My rent alone is double the national average monthly salary of a Vietnamese person.

Ideally, all of us digital nomads and the retirees would like to see some sort of method of us simply paying to stay in the country. Immigration could make a fair bit of money if they were to offer this but then again, if they did so, they might end up with TOO MANY digital nomads moving here.

As it stands now Da Nang is one of the most popular digital nomad locations of anywhere in the world so maybe they intentionally DO NOT offer a longer visa because the numbers need to be controlled. I have no idea but in the meantime, I am glad that we have the ability to stay here long-term at all. I know that in other countries, including two that I have lived in (Thailand and Malaysia) they will not let you have any more tourist visas once you have accumulated a certain amount of them over the course of a year.

If I didn’t have Nadi I would probably just jump between 3 or 4 countries every 3 months. Moving a dog internationally is a relative logistical and financial nightmare, so that isn’t an option for me or at least, not one that I am willing to take on. Unlike the west, this part of the world never embraced the whole “fake emotional support animal” thing which is a shame. I would gladly pretend that I am a bit nuts in order to be able to take her with me when I go somewhere.

So here I sit in Da Nang’s airport for the first time in 2024 and it wont be my last either. The total cost is a bit over $200 for me to fly to get Taco Bell in the Bangkok airport and honestly, I would rather forgo my tacos and just give that $200 to some immigration official to not have to leave. Hopefully, an option like this will be available in the future but for now, this is the only way.