Executive Summary
Technological advancements have facilitated remote working practices in an unprecedented way. While the COVID-19 pandemic made ‘work-from-home’ familiar in local settings, many people started to combine remote work and travel more extensively. Companies and governments are increasingly looking at borderless labour as an answer to the competition for global talent. This separation of work and geographical location has spurred on the development of so called ‘Digital Nomad Visas’ (DNVs), issued by countries eager to attract transnational remote workers to their territories. This policy brief highlights the shortcomings and gaps in the current offering of DNVs and other related schemes in relation to a whole spectrum of transnational remote working mobilities. It then offers recommendations for a continuum of policies that extend beyond economic gain, seeking mutual benefits for the host countries, individual global talents, and other stakeholders.
Key Messages
1. Governments are competing for skilled foreign workers, yet work is no longer inextricably tied to location. This situation requires new policy solutions that are different from ‘traditional’ labour migration policies.
2. The current DNVs have failed to understand digital nomadism, resulting in low adoption rates. Digital nomads continue to primarily utilize tourist visas for their mobilities.
3. Countries should recognize that there are various types of remote working mobilities and that digital nomads are only one particular type. Each country should have multiple tailored policies to match the whole spectrum of remote working mobilities.
4. These policies should be designed as a continuum that allows for status change from short-term remote working visits, to medium and long-term stays. This way, they function as a funnel to attract, commit and retain global talent as long-term residents.
5. This continuum of policies helps to realise the mutual benefits that span beyond short-term, tourism-like economic gains to longer term human capital gains from transnational remote working flows as a whole.
The Premise of This Policy Brief
This policy brief is based on an existing body of work by the authors. Firstly, an overview and analysis of the current state of DNVs and related schemes by Lily Szabo (née Bruns) as presented in her white paper on the subject (Bruns & Lee, 2023). Secondly, research by Kaisu Koskela on the policy rationales of governments implementing DNVs (Koskela & Beckers, 2024) and the responses of digital nomads to the emergence of these visas (Koskela, forthcoming). Furthermore, the policy recommendations rely on two independently acquired sets of data by the authors: an online survey of 87 digital nomads by Szabo for Remote Commons (Bruns, 2023) and empirical fieldwork data and interviews by Koskela among digital nomads in five countries over a 9-month period.
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