I've said it many times before that Vietnam is an absolutely wonderful place to live as a digital nomad. The combination of wonderful weather - well I suppose it is a bit too hot during a lot of the year but we have AC! - and the very low cost of living makes this an amazingly attractive place to live for those that want to walk away from western life and be able to live "richly" on a couple of thousand dollars (or less) per month.
3 years ago this was relatively easy to accomplish as there were cheap flights going every direction and Vietnam Immigration didn't seem to care how many times you renewed your stamp. I know some people that have gotten so many tourist visas in their passport that the issue started to become whether or not they were going to run out of pages in their passports, not whether or not they would be given another visa.
The idea of being a digital nomad used to be something that not very many people would qualify for but these days, it seems as though almost any profession has the option for doing something like this. Covid in particular showed us that many of not most jobs can be done remotely and commuting to the office isn't necessarily something that needs to be done. In some cases it may actually be counter-productive to employee satisfaction rates. In the past 3 years I have seen so many different kinds of professions pop up here in Vietnam whereas before we almost entirely comprised of online teachers. These people were able to negotiate with their employers to receive a reduced salary in exchange for being allowed to work remotely. This of course introduces other complications such as time zones but for the most part, the people I have met have been a lot more happy working from abroad rather than being in their home countries which are a lot more expensive than here.
Everyone I have spoken to in this situation actually ends up with MORE of their salary going to savings due to the dramatically reduced cost of living in Vietnam, even with a 30-40% cut in their wages.
src
Vietnam used to be the perfect place for this sort of work because despite the very low cost of everything, the infrastructure including faster-than-the-west internet speeds, was a lot more developed than someone might think. You can live quite nicely here for under $1000 a month and in the west, I don't know of anywhere that this is possible.
The problem with being a digital nomad is that none of these countries are going to give you a long-term visa or a work-permit unless you are working for a Vietnamese company and unless someone is teaching in person or working at some local business, this simply isn't going to happen. It wasn't a big deal to do visa-runs every 3 months back when flights were less than $100 for a round trip bounce to Hong Kong or Thailand because the visas were also never denied provided the person didn't have a criminal record and were being sought by Interpol.
These days Vietnam has decided that they are only going to award 1-month visas and the cost of flights has gone through the roof. This is no longer a viable way of living and working as a digital nomad in this country and this is truly a shame because there are so many people that want to do it. There is also the threat of the officials arbitrarily denying you a visa simply because "you have too many visas already." I say this is arbitrary because basically everyone I know has a passport full of Vietnam stamps and most are approved, but some are denied. Are you going to take the chance and leave all of your possession in Vietnam and take the gamble that you wont be let back in? What are you going to do then?
The digital nomad population is diminishing in the town that I live in and according to other VN city residents, the same is true there as well. I can't really understand why the government would start to do this, especially after several years of lockdowns that resulted in almost no businesses doing any business at all. If there ever was a time to open the floodgates, it seems like it would be now. I'd like to believe that they have their reasons and that they are good reasons - and perhaps they do. They just aren't telling anyone about it and have no plan to re-instate the 3-month and 1-year visas like they had before. I believe we are going to see a lot of digital-nomads flee the country in the next year or so. Perhaps even myself. This is a shame because I really had hopes of setting up some sort of permanence here but now for me and thousands of others, this seems unlikely.