As an expat living in a developing country, provided you prepared enough to have somewhat gainful employment, you have a lot less daily worries than the average person living in North America and and most of Europe. One thing that always weighs heavy on our minds in the expat community that people living in their home countries don't have to ever worry about is whether or not they are going to be allowed to stay. We live in fear over here and the surrounding countries (and I presume other countries in the world) about whether visa policy is going to change abruptly.
This change in Thailand was rather gradual but eventually resulted in me not being willing to "play the paperwork game" anymore and this is why I now live in Vietnam. The visas were far less bogged down with paperwork and according to my friends who have lived here for years staying here on a tourist visa indefinitely is actually pretty easy to do provided you don't do anything stupid like traffic drugs or do other illegal stupidity.
Recently, some news started circulating that a directive was being passed down that would result in all the non-Vietnamese being kicked out of the country and there were lots of different variation of this that were circulating.
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Bruce might be a real person, but he is not me!
The messages started happening a few days ago and mostly it was just in conversation and no one had any real details but the underlying message was the same: The government is no longer going to issue visa extensions and all the non-Vietnamese would have to get out.
I was skeptical at first but things like this, even if they are simply hearsay, tend to weigh kind of heavy on your mind because even though I doubted that my friends that were saying this had heard this in any sort of official capacity, I was concerned that at least to some degree that it was rooted in some level of truth.
I woke up to this message from a friend that I have known since before I ever moved here and she was actually quite instrumental in my decision to move here in the first place.
Hey, how are you doing? This morning I heard terrible news for all foreigners, that they have to leave the country - no extensions! So, what's your situation?
Later in the day I heard the same thing from other people when we were gathered on the rooftop for some beers. When I asked what their source was one person said "such and such told me" and the other person said they saw it on the Da Nang locals FB group. As soon as I heard Facebook mentioned, it put my mind at ease for the most part, because while I do not participate in that scene, I know that it is mostly filled with toxic people and a lot of folks in there intentionally stir up controversy by virtue of being what I presume to be terrible people.
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I am the kind of dude that takes things as they come and didn't worry about it a great deal because let's say for example that it was true? What am I going to do about it? I would have no choice but to comply or of course me and Nadi could live our lives on the run from authorities - which she would probably enjoy.
It was kind of funny because this rumor got so widespread that without me initiating the conversation my visa agent contacted me and everyone else that she does visas for to put our minds at ease presumably because she was getting tired of getting so many messages about it.
Part of her text to us included the following which I don't even really understand.
It's just for who have DN visa or LD visa (business visa has sponsors) and they are not really work for that sponsor.
So what I interpret from this (there was more to the message than just that) is that there are a lot of people in Vietnam that in the interest of getting a longer-term visa and also a TRC (Temporary Resident Card) they would become sponsored by a company that is either not a company at all or they don't actually work there.
This is actually a common loophole that people I know in Thailand utilized for years in Thailand but it is very surprising to me that people would bother trying to pull this scam in Vietnam. The way that visas work here (or worked i should say, pre-Covid) is that essentially everyone was entitled to 3 month or 1-year visas that could be renewed indefinitely and literally no one that I know has ever been denied one of these. The only issue was that you would have to cross a border in order to get your new visa, which is a process that is utilized around the world and I fail to understand the purpose of.
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Basically this involved finding the cheapest international flight that you could find and making it a round trip ticket on the same day. For me, I would never even leave the airport but simply go through immigration, maybe stop and get the most expensive Burger King in Asia for lunch, then go back through immigration and get back on a 1 hour flight back into Vietnam. It was inconvenient and normally would cost around $75 or so but it wasn't the end of the world and was much simpler than the roasting that you would receive if you were trying to pull this same "trick" in Thailand.
The process was made even easier if you had an agent process the paperwork for you, which is what I did. The visa itself also cost money but it wasn't much. Basically this all boiled down to your somewhat permanent stay in Vietnam costing you around $50 a month when you put all the pieces together. After living in Thailand and paying upwards of (and sometimes beyond) $2000 a year to maintain a visa for many years, this was and is a tremendous bargain.
So the rumors turned out to be exactly that - just rumors that were not based in any sort of reality and just someone panicking or intentionally stirring the pot for their own trolling amusement.
So if you live in Vietnam on a tourist visa and have been extending it like you are supposed to, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. If you have been scamming the system with fake employment or a fake company.... well it's a different story for you and I can't really relate to why you would have attempted something like that in the first place.