From Foe To Friend: Remote Work Visas & the Revalorisation of the (Digital) Nomad

A repurposed version of this article was published in University of Melbourne’s Pursuit magazine on September 1, 2021.

Whilst nomads have historically been seen as a threat to the unity of the nation-state and actively disciplined, denounced and derided, several countries around the world are turning this politico-historical practice on its head and actively seeking to attract a growing legion of nomads via new remote work/digital nomad visas.

The coronavirus pandemic has nudged the world into the twilight of liminality where control has been stripped at the door and a pervasive uncertainty and anxiety is now the norm. Collectively, we stand suspended between the death throes of a dying pre-COVID existence and the unseen emergence of a post-coronavirus era.

But already perceptible in the half-light of this new world is a changing geopolitical landscape. In recent years, and especially in the last 12 months, several countries around the world – from Iceland to Mauritius, Croatia to The Bahamas, Malta to Dubai and many others – have introduced remote work/digital nomad visas to attract an itinerant community of digital workers – a community set to grow exponentially as the global pandemic continues to untether workers from offices and cubicles around the world.

And yet, in addition to provoking this radical change in traditional work practices, an equally significant development has begun to emerge in the international geopolitical order.

For centuries nomadic people were seen as an existential threat to the integrity of the modern state and its monopoly of citizenry control, ordering and containment.

Transcending local, regional and national loyalties, nomads were inscribed with immoral intent and seen as a challenge to the power apparatuses of the state that functioned on bounded and bordered communities. With no addresses to their name, rootless nomads were not so easily controlled.

But the introduction of these new visas is helping to revalue and reinterpret the nomad from a foe to a friend in modernity: from figures feared and kept out, to a new class of nomadic capital that’s invited in with open arms. What we are witnessing is an attitudinal shift towards mobile people and a change of heart and policy that challenges the traditional exclusionary practices of nation-states towards nomadic people – well, at least a certain kind of nomad.

Whilst COVID-19 positioned remote work to the centre of public debate over the last 18 months, working remotely has been around for years – at least, for a lucky segment of business travellers and a small, but growing, group of digital nomads.

For these (mostly) tech-savvy millennials from the Global North, travelling the world whilst working online has been a reality for more than a decade.

In 1997, technology visionaries Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners forecasted a future where computing technology and the proliferation of Wi-Fi would untether workers from their offices, allowing them, for the first time since the agricultural revolution over 10,000 years ago, to indulge humanity’s natural proclivity to wander and roam.

In this tech-mediated mobile future, they argued, people would form ‘tribes’ or communities based on shared goals, interests and values in different pockets of the world. This would mean people would no longer base their identity or stake their loyalties on where they came from or where they were born.

In brief, nationalism and the nation-state would lose their relevance in a world of unhindered global mobility.

Fast forward to 2021 and digital nomadism has become a reality and a way of life. In the USA alone, more than 10 million people identify as digital nomads, and by 2035, this number is expected to reach a billion worldwide – and that was before COVID-19.

But only in the last few years has another prediction made by the authors materialised. Writing over 20 years ago, Makimoto and Manners also envisioned a future characterised by competition between nation-states, with each seeking to attract this nomadic workforce and the resultant revenue, capital and tax dollars they bring to the table. Georgia and Estonia were some of the first countries to position themselves as nomad-friendly destinations, and many other countries have since followed suit.

The recent pandemic has only accelerated this competition and appeal of these itinerant workers. As businesses around the world responded to the imperatives of social distancing and isolation by looking to the cloud as their savour and transferring their operations online, millions of newly untethered workers were suddenly free to work from wherever they wanted.

Suddenly, traditionally tourism-dependent economies, such as Barbados, were faced with a stark choice: adapt or decline. Seeking to capitalise on this newly untethered global workforce and offset the losses of a dwindling tourism sector, many countries repositioned themselves as digital nomad hotspots (with favourable tax schemes) and not just somewhere to go on a holiday.

Other countries, such as Greece, are now thinking along similar lines.

In doing so, these nation-states and their newly minted digital nomad/remote work visas are overturning long-held exclusionary practises towards nomads, albeit, an economically, socially and politically privileged group of mobile people. 

Indeed, nomads are no longer seen as threats to keep out, but, viewed through the lens of economic rationalism, they’re now a hot commodity, and no longer such a dirty word in the political lexicon.