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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

I see these visas and I understand there are some circumstances where maybe you have to get one (employer letting you work remote, maybe certain kinds of rental housing) but honestly I don't understand why they have any requirements, and opposed to just asking an otherwise admissible person to declare they're there for work. Like others, I can already go for 90 days if I want for tourism, just with my passport. I don't have to prove income or insurance or submit a photo. What real risk are they taking by just letting my say I'm coming for 6 months to work remotely? All the "remote" visas I've seen are similar, and it all just seems like some silly think bureaucrats dreamed up because they can't let go of control, that really is pointless.

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It's very straightforward: they don't want poor or middle-class foreigners in their country. They want rich people. So that the rich people can live in expensive housing, eat at expensive restaurants, and pump their riches into Iceland's economy.

This is why the minimum barrier to entry into this program is having an income of ISK 1,000,000 per month, which means that you need a salary of over €80 000.

Additionally, they also don't want foreigners to actually settle in their country, which is why there is a 180-day ceiling. The purpose of this program is to have rich foreigners come for a spell, spend lots of money, then go away. They're being very transparent about this.

Iceland is in Schengen, so foreigners living in a country which is also a member have the ability to move to Iceland and settle here. So foreigners are welcome here. So much so that 14% of all residents are foreign and that does obviously not count those who have received citizenship.

$80k/year is rich? That’s less than the median household income in a half-dozen states. 18% of Americans make over $100k/year.

> $80k/year is rich?

Yes.

> That’s less than the median household income in a half-dozen states.

That's nice. Can you guess how many states there are in the world?

The fact that you're using the claim that a minority percentage in a single country makes a large amount of money as an argument for the claim that an 80.000 salary is not rich, is a stereotypically American myopic outlook at the world.

> $80k/year is rich? That’s less than the median household income in a half-dozen states.

(1) EUR 80,000 > USD 80,000 (about USD 86,700)

(2) We’re discussing individual wages not household income of households where the average is >1 wage-earner.

(3) The highest US state median wage is a little over USD 80k, and less than EUR 80k.

(4) The US is a rich country, so, yes, median wage earners in the US as a whole (much less the median wage earner of the state scoring highest on that metric) are rich by any non-US-specific standard.

>$80k/year is rich?

Yes, 80 thousand Euros per year wages is rich by most EU standards.

>18% of Americans make over $100k/year.

Wow, America, the richest country in the world, has many rich people. The more you learn.

The top 18% of income earners are in the “rich” category, lol… what are you on about. Of course.

The US is a very, very rich country. That's why so many people want to move to it.

Limits on numbers. Welcoming you as a tourist and welcoming you indefinitely are not the same thing. It's not a big population so wouldn't take a very large number of arrivals to impact public services like healthcare and schools.

Which in order to grow, you'd need more people. And they're not canadians, they don't have an easy immigration path for people that want to move in.

In a way, they're pretty japanese.

Iceland population is about 0.3M. perhaps they're happy with that?

Why would they want to grow their population?

If you don't have population growth, you can't replace the old generation fast enough.

Eventually your retirement system will crumble. Not tomorrow, not next year, but maybe a couple decades from now. And it's not something you can fix in a year or two.

Maybe they don't want to remote workers? They make hard to get visas and discourage working on a tourist visa?

There are several nationalities belonging to the third world for whom this is a godsend (not this one particularly, but others in the region). As an Indian national, I have to undergo a painful process to procure a tourist visa, which is often valid only for a few days. Something like this which let's me work remotely for clients based over Europe and North America, and let's me travel through Schengen without any stress is really a game changer.

Third world tourist that earns over 8k per month? Quite a small pool to draw from there.

> As an Indian national

As an Indian national, you are not eligible for this visa program.

One of the requirements is:

> you do not need a visa to enter the Schengen area

How strange. I could have sworn the Spanish and Greek ones didn't have this requirement. Then it's indeed fairly useless.

That's even stranger then, so it's exclusively targeting people who could effectively just come there anyway.

Correct. It is very explicitly targeting tourists who want to stay for more than 90 days, up to 180 days. Basically this is a convoluted method of extending tourism to rich tourists for a longer (specifically, a double) period of time to have them pump more of their money into the country. That's all.

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