Things are changing a lot in Vietnam as far as visas are concerned. I'm not talking about visas for people that want to come and visit here for a few days and then leave to not return for a long time, or perhaps to never return. I'm talking about the visa options that are available for people who live like I do and want to stay here for long periods of time and work remotely. There are a lot of us here that do exactly that and things have changed frequently and dramatically over the past several years.
I don't know why it started, or why it continues but the government has their own reasons for why they decided to change things so much but perhaps it was due to Covid boredom on the part of the government and a feeling to mess about with everything they possibly could since the country was at a stand still like most anywhere else in the world.
Things have been changing so much in the past 2 years and in particular the past year, that it is hard to know what the hell is going on but yesterday I went to a meeting that one of the major agents of this area coordinated and there was a rather high-ranking Immigration official present as well - so while things are different all around the world to some certain degree, I have a great deal of faith that this system that we were told about yesterday is about as close to the truth as things are going to get.
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So they way it stands now is that people that want to live and work here remotely for a company that is not based in Vietnam there are no visas that are specifically designed to accommodate that. According to the agent there is nothing in the works to attempt to accommodate this sector either. As I mentioned before, the government officials are very aware of the fact that there are a lot of people here that work remotely and they are aware of the fact that we use consecutive back-to-back-to-back tourist visas in order to achieve this end.
Previously, this incorporated getting something called and E-visa before you left the country (provided you were currently residing in Vietnam) and then planning a flight around those dates. You were easily able to complete this process while you were still in the country and other than the nuisance of needing to take the flights for what appears to be no reason, it was guaranteed that your visa would be extended. There has been no instance of anyone I know, or anyone that I know knows that has ever arrived at the airport and been turned back once they had this piece of paper. The agents didn't even spend a lot of time scrutinizing it and I don't know if this is because their computer system works really well or if the piece of paper itself is just a formality and a hoop to get people to jump through. Someone actually asked the Immigration official about this last night but he kind of skirted the question as if it is none of our business how the form is worked and well, considering that this is a communist country it was kind of actually rude for the person to ask that. So we'll never really know but if you do not have this piece of paper, most airlines won't even let you on the airplane to come to Vietnam and therefore I will just presume that we need it.
Sometime in early January of this year, and again for reasons that are not told to us, Immigration stopped issuing E-Visas for people that are currently residing in the country. This indicates to me that they actually DO know if you are already in the country or not because most people were being denied an additional 3-month visa if they were currently residing in Vietnam when they applied. Some people managed to sneak through the cracks but more often than not, the people applying for the E-visa that were currently located in Vietnam were being denied.
According to the agent and the Immigration official at the meeting last night, there are only 2 options for those of us that wish to continue staying here for the long term. They did touch base on the potential existence of 6 and 12 month visas that are currently being discussed by Parliament, but confirmed what we already suspected in that these things, unless a country emergency is declared, do not happen quickly and even if there was great enthusiasm for this sort of thing to happen on the part of the government, it likely wouldn't even happen in 2024.
They did touch base on investment visas but the $20,000 buy in to make that happen is enough to chase most people away. The Immigration official sternly warned all of us against attempting to make an investment visa using a bogus company or bogus "borrowed" money that you only keep inside the company for a "snapshot" period of time because if and when it is discovered that you are attempting to knowingly defraud the country, you will be blacklisted for a number of years.
Here comes the important bit about what has changed
In order to get issued a new E-visa for 3 months the applicant must reside outside of Vietnam to be eligible for approval. This means that what I and many others have done in the past where we get an E-Visa date in the future and then plan round-trip travel to accommodate the 48-hour window of opportunity to re-enter the country can no longer be planned if you are currently residing in Vietnam. Like I mentioned before, if you try, a few of them might accidentally be approved anyway, but this is merely a clerical error and shouldn't be depended on. Of all the people that I know that have applied for visas while in-country, only about 10% of them have been approved, so this method should not be depended on at all.
I know a couple that is currently in the process of doing this right now and they have a couple of rescue dogs so it is a less than ideal situation for them. I am watering their plants while they are away and they are just spending some time in Malaysia doing some tourism while the E-visa process gets completed.
This can be complicated for some people because there is no guaranteed turnaround time for how long the approval process can be. It could be 2 days, it could be more than a week. So you have the added inconvenience of needing to book a last-minute flight and face the possibility of it being really expensive or even worse, not available at all. The best way to avoid this happening to you is to make your waiting "home base" somewhere like Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok because there are at least 10 flights a day coming to Da Nang from both of those places. If you are somewhere that is less serviced like Chiang Mai where there is only 1 flight every day, you could end up screwing yourself.
This is the point where the Immigration official stepped out and I think this was done on purpose because the other method that "might work for some" was something that involved a bit of a less than legal process. After the Immigration official left the agent told us about "another way" of getting the visa and it involves getting it approved while you are still in the country. The agent didn't offer any specifics and was careful to use very specific language and also asked everyone to not record what he was saying.
What followed was indicative of corruption in the system that if you wanted to, you could take advantage of. For a fee that was called a "special situation fee" the agent would be able to process your E-visa while you are still in Vietnam. The special situation fee is somewhere between $150 and $200.
While he didn't outright say it, it seems to me as though this fee was just some under the table bribe money that would end up in the pockets of the local Immigration officials to bypass the law of a person needing to be outside of the country before they can apply for another visa. He didn't go into great detail but he left it in an "up to you" type of way and for each of us to schedule an appointment with him to discuss the specifics if that was something we were interested in.
Now for me I feel as though this bribe could actually save me money because if I go and spend 3-5 days in another country, the cost of the hotel and doing whatever I am going to do while I am there is easily going to exceed $200. There was another concern of mine though as well. If this scheme is ever discovered by higher up officials, the blame will likely end up falling on the heads of the foreigners who took advantage of it and not on the heads of the government officials that offered it in the first place. This is what happened to friends of mine that were offered dodgy "investment visas" in the past and now they are scattered at various places around the world waiting for their chance to get back in to Vietnam. As far as I know, none of the government officials and agents that facilitated this service faced any major backlash despite the fact that it was they that offered this idea in the first place.
The other option that the agent offered us was that you could pay an "express fee" of $20 and this would guarantee that your stay outside of Vietnam will be minimalized and it would work like this.
- You book a one-way ticket out of Vietnam
- before you go to the airport you give the agent all of your information for applying for an E-visa on your behalf
- As soon as you go through Vietnamese Immigration at the airport you send him a message letting him know that you are through Immigration and he immediately submits your E-visa information
- You get on your plane and go hang out in Bangkok for a day or two and by then the E-visa is finished
Why would this not be dodgy? Well because at the very moment that an Immigration official stamps your passport in the airport you are technically not in Vietnam anymore despite the fact that you are. Once you go through those booths and get the stamp, you are in an international terminal, not in Vietnam.
This is the route I will take in order to protect my future in this country. This method is not breaking any laws and cannot come back to bite you in the ass later.
It sucks that we have to go through this process at all, but at the moment anyway, it does seem to be the only legal way of obtaining never-ending visas. The couple that I referenced earlier in the article are on such a visa run right now, so after they get back I will be able to give more concise details about what it all entails.