This is not a story about my own situation but rather the situation of a lot of people living in Vietnam who after things got difficult, just decided that they were no longer going to get any more visas.
Getting visas in Vietnam were a piece of cake when I first moved here about 5 years ago and people were more than happy to comply with the very easy rules that were associated with getting and keeping a visa. There were 3-month and 12-month options and the only thing that anyone had to do was pay the money, briefly leave the country, and then come back in. Many people were very pleased to do this and a lot of those people were not just doing border runs, but would use these breaks to go on a vacation somewhere else like Laos, Thailand, Singapore, etc.
It was because of this lax policy that Vietnam became one of the most popular digital nomad locations in the world and we were seeing influxes of people from other places that many nomads had previously lived.
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There are people out there that try to make it seem like the above picture is what it is like being a digital nomad in South East Asia but for most it is actually the interior of a small condo or a cement square in a suburb with cars all over the place. There's time for that in another story.. let's stick to the visa situation in Vietnam for now
When Covid happened and nobody could really go anywhere the Vietnamese government installed very broad and quite kind visa amnesty rules that applied to almost anyone. For most people these visas were free as well. People like me who had been here long before Covid were not given these visas for free. It wasn't an outrageous price by most people's standards and we were happy to continue like that in perpetuity if it was an option. Immigration was being "cool" during that time but unfortunately that all came to a crashing halt in around January of 2022.
From that point forward Vietnam did away with 3-month and 1-year visas and even started cracking down on the somewhat famous and also very bogus "investment visas." I don't know why they would make this sort of crackdown during a time when the entire world was recovering economically and it didn't make much sense to normal people to be kicking people out who were not taking jobs from locals and were boosting the economy with every daily purchase.
There are people out here (again, not me) who decided they simply were not going to play the visa game anymore and decided that they were just going to stay as long as they felt like it and deal with the overstay fines when they decided they were going to go.
There has been some fear among people who are living dangerously like this but the other day I met a guy that was, after you got to know him a bit and he could tell you aren't a rat, that he hasn't bothered with visas since January of 2020. In 2020 he was one of the people that arrived just before the date that the government had determined was the cutoff point for free amnesty visas. I think it was out of some sort of spite that he didn't pay for his visa or he might just not have very much money to be able to afford $100 a month for a visa, but regardless, he decided he wasn't going to do them anymore.
There has been no investigation, no effort to "find him," and no pressure from any authorities for him to report in and then exit the country. There has been no real word from anyone at all according to him. This of course will change whenever he decides that he wants or needs to leave the country, but in the meantime it has been all clear in his life and he doesn't really even worry about it anymore
In a way I find this sort of visa policy to be a bit refreshing, even though the people that are taking advantage of it are technically breaking the law. I would imagine that this is how it kind of works in other countries as well and it might be because of the fact that actually finding the people and forcing them to be processed and leave is likely more expensive than just waiting for them to leave on their own accord.
As it is right now I have NEVER known anyone that has been raided or visited by police or immigration and told to turn over their papers. I don't know anyone that knows anyone that this has happened to either. It remains a "Kentucky Fried Mouse" for now and while I definitely don't advise people to break visa law, I'm just saying that it isn't as dangerous as some out there might think.