Destinations knownWill Thailand beat Indonesia to offer Asia’s first digital nomad visa?

“The 21st century will be the millennium which resurrects for humans a dilemma which has been dormant for 10,000 years – humans will be able to ask themselves: ‘Am I a Nomad or a Settler?’” wrote tech pioneer Tsugio Makimoto and author David Manners in their 1997 book, Digital Nomad, which presented theories on how technology would change our working lives and introduced us to the now ubiquitous term used as the title.

In the decades since, digital nomads – loosely defined as location-independent remote workers who rely only on a decent internet connection to do their job – have gone mainstream, and for many footloose e-lancers, Asia is the region of choice. Ask any search engine which countries are best for digital nomads and Indonesia (read: Bali) and Thailand often come out on top.

Financial newspaper Nikkei Asia calls digital nomadism “the most lucrative and fastest-growing migrant worker trend of the digital era”, explaining that digital nomads “stay overseas for longer periods than regular leisure tourists, and, even during the pandemic, the market is growing”.

Consequently, countries around the world are wising up to the value of offering visas tailored to remote workers, with Estonia, Barbados and Dubai among those making it easy for e-lancers to toil on their soil. The same cannot be said for Asian nations, yet. Despite being preferred destinations, what most digital nomads are doing in Indonesia, Thailand and other Asian countries – including Cambodia, Taiwan and Vietnam – is essentially illegal.

Immigration services company Newland Chase breaks it down as follows: “Are digital nomads ‘working’ in the countries to which they travel? Technically, yes. However, most digital nomads enter the country using visa-free privileges based on their passports or via tourist visas. In almost no countries are you permitted to work while visa-free or on a tourist visa.”