Digital Nomads Are Getting Caught in the War on Tourism
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“It was a grueling three-hour commute to my Colorado office this morning. I left Telluride with a yellow day pack strapped to my back, and climbed north into the mountains through the golden glow of early-October aspens,” wrote Steven K. Roberts in his 1988 book, Computing Across America.
Roberts made his way through the remnants of a mining camp before settling at the desk he’d cobbled out of industrial junk the day before. “My chair is an old dynamite crate; my computer a Hewlett-Packard Portable. I flipped open the display, fired up Microsoft WORD, and here I am at work—pattering into a mountainside text file,” he wrote. “No, I’m not on vacation. I am a high-tech nomad—pedaling a recumbent bicycle around the United States with a portable computer while funding the journey with a sporadic outpouring of words.”
A year and a half earlier, Roberts had decided to leave behind his stationary life in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. He built a bicycle that doubled as a mobile office—”an eight-foot-long machine bedecked with solar panels and enough state-of-the-art gizmology to start an engineering school”—and embarked on a yearslong 17,000-mile journey throughout the United States. Roberts worked as a computer consultant and freelance writer from the road, filing articles via pay phone.
Roberts’ lifestyle was completely foreign in the 1980s. People were fascinated by the pioneering digital nomad, whose story landed him on The Phil Donahue Show and the front page of The Wall Street Journal. And it raised big questions about the future of work.
Before email, Zoom, and Slack became fixtures of everyday work life, the vast majority of the world’s white-collar workers were bound to physical offices. Truly remote jobs were scarce. Slowly but surely, technological innovations allowed more people to work from an entirely different city or state than their coworkers. Then the COVID-19 pandemic showed that millions could work remotely and effectively, thanks to increasingly accessible and functional digital services. From 2019 to 2021, the number of Americans primarily working from home tripled from 9 million to 27.6 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Also during the COVID-19 pandemic, countries around the world buttoned up their borders and told their citizens to stay home. As the pandemic receded and international travel restrictions began to lift, many newly remote workers were keen to live and work beyond their countries’ borders—and foreign governments began to notice.
Looking to capitalize on an unprecedentedly mobile work force, countries rushed to create visas tailored to so-called digital nomads. Since summer 2020, dozens have unveiled programs designed to entice remote employees to work from their soil. These programs grant legal status for longer than the typical tourist visa, which may be as short as 90 days. That longer term gives digital nomads the chance to build deeper connections in their host countries and have a wider range of experiences than a tourist might.
The benefits to remote workers are obvious, but countries benefit from digital nomad arrangements too. Some collect tax revenue from visa holders. Those that don’t still reap the benefits of remote workers spending their foreign incomes and sharing their cultures and skills with neighbors.
But not every kind of visitor is welcome in digital nomad–friendly countries these days. Even as governments set up visa programs specifically to attract the world’s mobile employees, they’re cracking down on tourists and the amenities they enjoy. Digital nomads may soon find themselves in cities and countries that have heavily restricted their Airbnb markets or imposed daily fees on tourists.
Can these two approaches coexist? Even though countries don’t treat digital nomads as tourists, they don’t treat them as permanent residents either. Digital nomads are bound to be caught in the tourist battles. If legal digital nomad status comes with enough downsides, remote workers won’t want it—and countries risk missing out on travelers who could help address tourism-related worries.
A New Work Life
Digital nomadism was already on the rise before COVID-era remote work freed more people to do their jobs from far-flung places.
The term digital nomad predates the pandemic by more than two decades. Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners’ 1997 book Digital Nomad “predicted a future workforce of globe-trotting travellers logging in from abroad” thanks to “technological advances and humanity’s will to explore,” reports the BBC. The idea gained more traction in “the 2010s, largely among young people looking for an early-career escape from the decades of 9–5 office work they saw looming before them.”
Estonia was the first country to unveil a formal digital nomad visa program after the pandemic began, doing so in summer 2020. Since then, dozens of countries have followed suit. More than 20 European nations offer digital nomad visas or other visas that are accessible to remote-working professionals. So do such expat favorites as Panama, Bali, Thailand, and Colombia. Tiny Caribbean island nations, bustling Asian economies, and some of the world’s most populous countries have all joined in.
Most of those visas allow remote workers to live in a country for at least a year. Most require an application fee and proof of regular income or available funds. Jobs must generally be based outside of the visa-issuing country. Beyond those basics, there’s quite a bit of variation. For example, Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Georgia allow applicants to bring their families. Digital nomads who live in Panama can apply for tax residency and may be able to avoid paying taxes at home. (Unfortunately for Americans working abroad, the IRS views “worldwide income” as “subject to U.S. income tax, regardless of where you live.”) Belize lets visa holders’ kids attend the country’s schools. Dominica offers the nomads duty-free goods and various discounts.
In 2023 the World Youth Student & Educational Travel Confederation projected that the global number of digital nomads would reach 40 million by the end of that year and 60 million by 2030. But it’s hard to say how large this globe-trottin
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