Korea to welcome 'digital nomads' with new visa starting Jan. 1

[1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Remote-Salary#Yearly

Just 0.7% off "double $33,000"...

“Come here, spend your money, enjoy our services and everything we built in the last centuries, then leave.”

Also, there's a 17 hour time difference between Korea and Los Angeles.

The logical thing to do is to allow both employee and employer to sign a document saying "we both agree that the employment laws of X will not apply, and all employment disputes will be resolved by the courts of Y country according to their laws".

X country would make an explicit law allowing digital nomads to do such a thing, perhaps with limits on Y (ie. require the company to have links to Y, or blacklist countries with zero employee protections whatsoever).

Almost certainly they are, as the same is even true with employment across state lines in the US. Labor laws are almost always determined by the employee’s place of residence vs. where the company is located.

The fact that the visa doesn't allow application to local jobs is enough to stop the first complaint on its tracks.

I wonder how they intend to deal with the seemingly inevitable rise in housing prices that comes with an influx of high earners.

That's not to say we shouldn't consider the consequences of these changes and provide incentives and disincentives to nudge things one way or another, and manage the demographic shifts in order to lessen their shocks.

Sometimes it’s phrased that any income from your home country while you’re in your guest country is only taxable in your home country. Other times it’s just credited against your local taxes (which could cover everything with a lot of paperwork, or could still leave you with an amount owing to cover the gap).

Sometimes even locally earned income is tax free, but that’s usually only for students.

I walked into the government office a couple times and tried to find a path to a legitimate visa and was told each time I couldn’t do it. I found that the longer I was staying, the less comfortable I was with my status. If there was a path for me to be a legitimate resident, I may have stayed longer than the 3 years I was there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_South_Korea

The biggest complaint foreigners have is foreigners tend to only stay for a few years, so you're always losing your close friends. My recommendation is to make sure your friends aren't other foreigners, but it can be hard to find English speakers (especially outside major cities)

I would say that, broadly speaking, yes. Korea today is a bit more welcoming than nearby countries like Japan, China, or Taiwan, etc. Since the last dictator in the late 80s, there's been a general consensus understanding that for Korea to survive as a civilization (being next door to more dominant and better known cultures from Japan and China), it must integrate with the rest of the world, and produce meaningful cultural exports and become valued by the international order. The rise of Korean media is not an accident but part of a long-term series of programs to build viable industries in film, music, food, etc. and have those industries take root outside the country in order to create export markets -- very important when your entire economy is built on being export driven. Almost all of the Koreans I personally know, regardless of industry, would jump at the chance to work with a foreigner if it meant they could do some international business.

Korea is pretty small, so you quickly exhaust domestic travel options. As a result, the average Korean, while being somewhat parochial in outlook is pretty curious about the rest of the world, many now have the means to travel abroad, and they do so pretty often. It's not uncommon to be at the Louvre or the British museum and see tour buses of elderly Koreans unload. The succeeding generations, being better educated and often with better foreign language and cultural skills often just skip the organized group tours and go on their own.

When I first went to Korea, even seeing any signage in English was rare. Today, in Seoul you can usually find "ok" English signage around tourist spots, and it's not as impossible as it once was to find somebody who can have a very basic English conversation. Many vendors will have English language signs and it's atypical to be given "tourist" prices. I'd say in those respects it's easier to get around Seoul than Tokyo for example. If I had to sum up the Korean approach to dealing with foreigners is that "your money spends just as well as anybody else's".

Housing costs, especially in Seoul, can be high. If you are from a U.S. Coastal urban megalopolis area, they'll be comparable. If you have lots of cash on hand, the Jeonse (Key Money) practice can be helpful in helping set a low monthly budget. Outside of Seoul, housing is much more affordable, and to be honest, I find the smaller cities much more enjoyable and they aren't far from all that Seoul has to offer by bullet train. But locals may not be happy if an influx of nomads drives housing prices up. If I had to pick, I'd probably choose either Jeonju or Gwangju to live in (cheaper COL, great food, nice chill vibes in the southwest) or maybe Daegu if you like proximity to hiking in the mountains, and not far from the beaches in Busan. But I'm old, if you want nightlife, Seoul is where it's at.

All this combines to make being there pretty decent for the average foreigner, but not necessarily "cheap" like you might find in Thailand or other typical digital nomad countries. You'll always find assholes or grumpy old people like anywhere, but on the average you'll find most people on the day to day easy enough to interact with, and eager to do business with you. That being said, there are very few protections against discrimination. If something ends up with the police, it's pretty typical for the foreigner's account to be dismissed still -- so there's still some growing pains there -- it's not uncommon for media plotlines to revolve around some ill that a foreigner brought in with them.

With the demographic crash happening, and Korea becoming more of a destination country for foreigners (a little over 4% of the population are foreign and it hosts one of the largest American immigrant populations in the world), I expect there will still be quite a bit of social development occurring as the nation figures out if it can really welcome foreigners in a way that aligns with national aspirations -- but it's likely that we'll see a more cosmopolitan country in the future. The changes just in the last 20 years have been phenomenal to see first-hand.

If you want to see what pretty normal interactions are like with Koreans, I'd recommend the youtuber "Where is Dan", who's on a mission to visit every district in Seoul and practice his pretty basic conversational level Korean with as many shopkeeps and people on the street as he can get on camera. But the interactions are 100% authentic and typical of what a foreigner might find there. https://www.youtube.com/@whereisdan/videos

Businesses can arbitrarily reject you as there are (seemingly) no protections. I saw a (white) guy from Uzbekistan get rejected from a club for no reason other than his nationality.

Black people definitely experience racism in Korea. Not exactly like in the US obviously but it's a real phenomenon that people tend to dismiss.

Kind of, it depends on your ethnicity. Koreans tend to treat white people pretty well. There’s a lot of anti Chinese sentiment, and some anti Japanese. If you have African ancestry they won’t mistreat you but they have very strange stereotypes. There’s currently a “crisis” regarding South East Asian illegal immigrants plus drug smuggling, so if your ethnically from that region keep that in mind.

Korea is not as open to foreigners as for instance Thailand. It’s similar to Japan, being more easy to make friendships but having less State services that are foreigner friendly. Most documents are available in English, and most freeway signs are in both Hangeul and English.

If you can argue well, an appeal to a "we" and to a specific use of language in an online forum won't be necessary.

As I understand it, the whole point of these schemes is to collect money from people who do have it, instead of losing it to the guys who simply do remote work on the "tourist" visa.

A large amount of foreign income being spent in a local economy may cause temporary disruptions to the status quo but is overall a good thing. It shouldn't really be a surprise that governments worldwide are encouraging it.