Recently the Vietnamese government announced that they are going to return to the 3-month visa for tourism for many nationalities and they are also extending visa on arrival for a lot of, but mostly neighboring Asian countries, to 45 days. This can mean very big things for Vietnam and also for people like myself that live and work here without directly working for a Vietnamese company.
This has been a problem for a lot of digital nomads ever since Vietnam reversed the rules back in January of last year and took the tourist visa back to 30 days.
Now that they are reinstating the 90 day visa that you have to apply for online before arrival - it is very easy - digital nomads might just come back and live in Vietnam again and this can mean very good things for me, and for you, if you happen to be someone that works remotely like I do.
While I do not know if the country is going to stick with the attitude of just letting all of us stay as long as we want to I DO know that until Covid happened, this country had a long history of just allowing people to do exactly that provided they didn't work illegally or break any other sort of law.
The world is a changing place and more and more people are starting to work from just wherever, just like me. I like to believe that I am a pioneer of sorts because of the fact that I was doing this before Covid kind of forced it upon us. I met a bunch of other people that were doing all sorts of jobs remotely and by doing so in whatever country they were doing it in, they didn't negatively impact that country by doing it.
We work online, we rent houses or apartments wherever we live, and we spend money wherever we happen to live. It seems to me that it is a win/win for all parties involved until the government starts to worry about taxation and I think that this is where the real problem lies with most governments. They want their piece of the pie but unfortunately, unless there is going to be complete societal control and regulation of everything that happens online, this is something that any country is ultimately going to fail at attempting to do.
I think that Vietnam kind of realizes this and thought that the increased spending inside of their country might be a net benefit.... and if that is the case I think it is a wise choice on their part seeing as how they can't really prevent it and if they chase away all the digital nomads they aren't really helping their own population since people like me were never taking potential jobs away from their own population in the first place. Most digital nomads like myself work for a distant country and simply live where they do because they enjoy the benefits of a reduced cost of living. Virtually every DN that I meet is living in Vietnam specifically for this reason.
So while I would wait a little while before your sell of your house to move to Vietnam to work remotely here, there is a very good chance that once this changing in visa policy hits in mid August, that it is going to be here to stay. I say this because it was that way for many years long before I ever moved here and no one really knows why they ever changed it to 30-days. The Parliament voted 98% in favor of moving the visas back to 90-days and this suggests extremely widespread support for it and I don't see that changing.
Sensibility has prevailed and I think that once this rule takes full effect we may even see the government here attempt to make Vietnam even more attractive to people who work remotely. I think there is a wonderful opportunity of any developing country that decides to do exactly that. Money that is made outside of a country and is brought into it for spending purposes is a net benefit to that country and while we will have to wait and see, I really believe that Vietnam will soon return to a very good position as far as this line of work is concerned.
For now, I would wait until at least September to see if there are additional ramifications from all of this but for the time being it looks very positive that this country actually DOES want to see outside workers working remotely in it.