South Korea launches digital nomad visa to boost remote work options in 2024 | Hacker News Reader

South Korea launches digital nomad visa to boost remote work options in 2024

techsauce.co

43 pointsT-A58 comments

I haven't seen any "digital nomad visas" that make much sense for a typical nomadic remote worker. Why go through all the bureaucracy when I can just quietly work while on 30-90 day visa-free (or cheap and easy visa-on-arrival) tourist entry stamps?

Because that’s typically illegal?

As long as your source of income is entirely outside the country, which it typically is, then in most cases you're fine. You're essentially just like a travelling investor. It's earning income from within the country that you can't do legally without a visa.

That's not true, and it's often not well known, but your own physical location is also a factor, not only your source of income. Most countries would never detect this anyways, but you shouldn't think that it's legal at all.

Well then I guess the lawyers I hired in country were all lying to me? As long as I didn't overstay my visa, didn't stay more than the required time for physical presence test tax liability (typically 180 days), and didn't work for firms inside the country, I was legit.

Please let me know if I was given bad legal advice, because I don't want to get thrown in jail in the future.

If they told you the legal advice they were giving you for a specific country was valid in all countries, and that all countries treated this income the same way, then yes, they lied to you.

This is not correct if you are doing actual work in the country. What's happening is, many of these countries are low income ones; and this kind of work is far removed from their economies. So they are turning a blind eye to it.

Going for a 30-90 days to a country usually means you rent a short term overpriced Airbnb. With longer visa you can get a normal one-year lease, for most likely the same price.

Still cheaper than going through gov. bureaucracy and having a higher tax exposure. In many other places, you can still rent long-termish and still visa-run regularly.

Staying a year often makes your tax resident which is exactly the kind of headache nomads moving around are trying to avoid.

For example if you own any stocks and become tax resident, then leave and break tax residency, you may often owe an "exit tax" on your unrealized stock gains.

Even stocks in your retirement accounts like IRA may not be treated as tax advantaged by another country.

I don't know how the whole digital nomad model works, but I'm guessing that it's kind of a hassle to have to spend money every 30-90 days to cross out of the country and back in. Plus, some countries have policies to counteract this "infinite visa glitch" and can punish people for doing this.

Most digital nomads I know (including myself) do not go back to the same country at the end of their 30-90 days though. They hop to another country or do a stop at home for a while to do anything they may need to at home before heading somewhere else.

I regularly stay somewhere for 90ish days, then go home for a while to do anything I need to back home days and then somewhere else.

This is also why a digital nomad visa for a year or more doesn't make much sense. I know very few true digital nomads who even have a desire to stay the same place for more than a few months. At that point you're not a digital nomad anymore.

I'm curious - since the individual stops are so relatively short, how do you manage to stay on top of it all? How do you consistently find short-term housing every 30-90 days at a reasonable price?

This model sounds pretty appealing to me as something to consider doing in the future, but I'm not sure on just how much hassle this would introduce.

> at a reasonable price

this is the crux; what is reasonable for a tech worker can be a whole paycheck for someone in the community they are moving to

> how much hassle this would introduce

this is controversial; you are no doubt injecting capital into the local economy, but what are the ultimate consequences?

nyc has a saying: no such thing as a free lunch (the economics always balance out in the end, even if you can't see the scales working)

I usually plan it out way in advance. Usually I have accomodations booked at the least 6 months out for the next trip.

Example: right now I'm somewhere in the middle of a 90 day stay. We also were somewhere else just before for the holidays for ~30 days, but mostly for vacation. I plan to go back home at the end of March for ~2 months or so to get things straightened out there before then heading out for another 4-5 months afterwards. I've already booked that trip. Usually just as one trip is starting I book the next one for 6 months later.

I travel with my wife so we either book private rooms in a hostel or AirBnB's, though we've been trending away from this.

To be fair, we're both software devs so our salaries together make living basically anywhere "reasonable" depending on how you look at it. We know we're paying a premium but since we can afford it we don't really look at it as unreasonable. Most places we stay come out to ~$2000 USD per month for AirBnB's, and much less for most hostels.

I also keep a cheap studio apartment back in the US for when I'm back for a while, so I don't have to plan where to stay when I'm back. But I know many digital nomads who just use their parents places or another close family member.

Though this is just my experience, many digital nomads I know don't have things planned out as far as we do. And literally just plan things on a whim less than a month out.

It's illegal, and also in Korea it's extremely annoying, as many online or daily services work with an Alien Registration Card, which you don't have with a simple tourist visa.

> just quietly work while on 30-90 day visa-free (...) tourist entry

dude.

Generally restrictions are against working for a local company, since that would be a workaround of getting the right visa for you.

I think most tourist entries are ok with working for a company abroad, especially if some jobs might require to step-in while on vacation.

There should be footnotes in forms that tourist visa works for business trips. It's often ok in that sense, not as in throwing in the straw hat and Hawaiian shirt to trash can just past the border control is ok or not

I'd rather ignore it since tourist visas are short. The alternative is to add rules to stress some people out, and have others willingly ignore them as it gets you into the idiotic space of having a rule that's not really enforced or worse, not even enforceable in a reasonable way.

As with almost every digital nomad visa I’ve seen, this seems poorly thought out, tax implications aren’t clear, but is someone’s “let’s be modern!” pet project.

UAE’s Remote Work visa is the only one I’ve been tempted to use so far.

Much easier for the UAE to do this as they have no income taxes; and also they are used to having a large foreign population on their soil (and normalized with that situation). Most other countries are not ready for that.

My memory may be failing, last time (15 years ish? ) I looked at living / staying in Korea most places asked for a full years rent up front, then additional rent each month. You are supposed to get it back at the end of the lease. It would be trivial for a land lord to abuse a foreigner in this circumstance on the VISA, its not like you can stay around after the end of your lease to take them to court to recoup your money.

I'd be very careful about this.

Exactly, I suffered this landlord abuse while working abroad. Apartment was delivered back to the landlord crystal clean and 100% intact. Then they took my entire deposit and billed me around 12,000 EUR. I even had pictures to show that I had done no damage, but you can imagine how foreigner vs native testimony works in these kinds of super-racist countries. I managed to leave before I had to pay the bill, but I still lost my full deposit. Apparently this "fleece the foreigner" is a well known tactic in some countries.

Where was this? Asking so I can never visit.

That is a very specific legal arrangement, which I understand is getting rarer and rarer these days.

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

Ah, that is good to hear. Can foreigners enter a 'western' like rent agreement ?

As I wrote a year ago the range of new digital nomad visas are largely poor attempts at attracting more tourism dollars.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/digital-nomad-visa-dilemma-ma...

Most digital nomads still don't use them as other Commenters have outlined, they are cumbersome, expensive & don't address the taxation elements well.

Digital Nomad entrepreneurs can often work under standard 'tourist' visas in any case if they stick to the 'business' rules attached to those visas in any case.

While Permanent Establishment rules scare many employers off permitting much remote work for their employees.

With competition between countries to attract tourism the current version 1 DN visas will need to change to become attractors.

I'd suggest removing the 30/90 limit from tourism visas is an easy way to improve tourism economics.

Changing taxation policies will take longer but are also needed as the remote worker world grows so strongly & favour 'tax friendly' nations.

Extensive discussion 3 weeks ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38804452

Again no mention of taxation

Which usually means you’ll be caught my the country’s general tax provisions, and the local tax agency will have no institutional knowledge of how this is meant to work for people on this visa.

So I've got to prove I make $70k a year, and then put down a $7500 deposit on a small apartment that costs me $1800 a month in a crappy part of Seoul, and get insurance and a bunch of other things, and then I only get to stay six months, and if I extend it it's only up to two years? No thanks.

When will the demographic time bomb racial supremacist countries learn that people want to ACTUALLY IMMIGRATE to countries? Become a part of the society and live their the rest of their lives? Like you can do in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, USA (if you get off H1B).

Too little, too late. Sit back and watch their population pyramid implode and enjoy the popcorn.

I don't know much about South Korea's immigration policies, but why should this specific program accommodate permanent immigration? This visa is the opposite of a worker visa for a person that may want to become a permanent resident in the future - its purpose is to let someone live on their land while still being considered a citizen of their origin country for all other purposes. I'm guessing that there are better visa options out there for people who want to live and work in SK full-time.

In most countries if you stay long enough and qualify then you become a permanent resident.

The sneaky trick that SK is doing with its maximum term of 2 years is ensuring that no one on this arrangement will be eligible (which apparently requires residing there for 5 years at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_South_Korea).

This makes the program entirely pointless for intended audience, ie. people dead set on living in South Korea (not just have fun for a year).

Or, more likely, people will switch to a different visa type if they’re looking to do more years? I’m not sure any of this counts as a “sneaky trick”

Of course and that's exactly the point. Other visa types require things like employment in SK or being Korean, things nomad visa is supposed to avoid

If the apartment is 1800$ a month, the deposit will be more like 15000$

From memory, you get this back at the end and need to keep paying rent each month. You can't 'spend' the deposit like some countries allow.

People can’t simply decide to move to the US, Australia and UK and spend the rest of their lives there.

The same applies to South Korea. You want to live there, you need to apply for a visa like everyone else.

Yeah, his point is that he isn't going to do it with those restrictions. Most of these startup visas have all these restrictions. And everyone is always like "yeah, you need to play by the rules like everyone else" and shit like that, but in the end it's just people saying "I'm not buying what you're offering" and then the government just sits there not having achieved whatever objective it set out to do with this stuff.

It's an asymmetric relationship. The nomad doesn't care if SK runs this program. But SK does care if people don't come.

> It's an asymmetric relationship. The nomad doesn't care if SK runs this program. But SK does care if people don't come.

Unfortunately, they don't particularly care. The whole driver behind this program is optics. Both to domestic voters "Look at how global and modern the current government is and how much we're doing", as well as to international headline-readers "Look at how progressive Korea is".

Ah, I see. In that case, I suppose no one really cares where it goes. S Korea's loss, in my opinion. They're the ones whose population will shrink by half every half-century from now.

> They're the ones whose population will shrink by half every half-century from now.

How is that a loss?

I think people are realising that the 'grow your way to success' model doesn't work for countries any more, unless you're the US, which is in a fairly unique position simply due to having a geography that no other country shares.

The immediate problems are likely to be that they will lose the ability to sustain welfare for their non-productive population (the elderly, children, disabled, etc.). The long-term problems are likely to be that they will fail to protect their borders eventually since they can't field a sufficiently large fighting force.

But perhaps they have another path. I guess it's good to have someone else run that experiment. We can observe and duplicate or avoid.

>We can observe and duplicate or avoid.

If you're the US, you can't. The US never learns from others' example: there's many examples of things other developed nations do far better than the US, but the US refuses to learn from their example. The US only makes big changes when it's their own idea, not because they saw it working well someplace else. Some examples: healthcare, the metric system, high-speed or even regular passenger rail, walkable cities, good zoning laws, etc.

Every rich country is currently undergoing a fertility crisis that will become an underpopulation crisis. South Korea's is particularly acute. There are various root causes and long-term fixes for this, but the only short-term fix is to open your country to immigration. This is part of why the US hasn't actually noticed its low fertility: we are a very desirable country to live in and we have legal paths to immigration that aren't predicated on signifiers of capital wealth. South Korea arguably has the desirability[0], but their immigration system is far more selective.

The kinds of optics South Korea can buy from virtue-signalling, but not actually implementing, progressive immigration policy are limited. You can't clickbait immigration law.

[0] Complicating South Korean immigration desirability are two competing factors:

- People from poorer countries tend to not be picky about what country will give them a visa, but,

- South Korea, like Japan[1] has racism and sexism problems that uniquely impacts immigrants from southeast Asia

[1] Korean and Japanese nationalists really hate it when you compare the two countries.

Shouldn't rich people be able to get hassle free visas? Why ban them from your country if they just want to live there and spend their money, regardless of whether they earn some more or not?

Just prove you have 100k and you get to stay this many days.

This is the hassle free rich people visa version of South Korea. Prove you earn $XXXXXX, leave $XXXXXX deposit, buy $XXXXX insurance = get a golden visa for two years, then get the hell out.

It's not to accommodate people who might actually want to live there (for whatever crazy reason)

But that means you need to have a job. Which many rich people don't really need or have.

I think many top percenters have income without tradjob, stuff like investment dividends and all that.

I don't think digital nomad visas are about demographics. This provides a legal way for people to do something that's already happening in many of these countries, so that's a good thing.

Further, I think these countries are aware that people would immigrate given the chance. They simply don't want the immigrants, and it's not really your place to demand they take them.

> So I've got to prove I make $70k a year, and then put down a $7500 deposit on a small apartment that costs me $1800 a month

Nice, <5 years old, fully furnished, two-bed room apartments in central, well-connected areas of Seoul are <$1000 per month.

And that's places that are suitable for 2 people to live in - the large majority of digital nomads live on their own, in which case it's even cheaper.

You must be aware of a different Seoul then I am. I've looked at moving there and asked my Korean friends. "Fully furnished, two-bed room apartments in central, well-connected areas of Seoul are <$1000 per month" does not jibe with anything I have seen, ever. Please send me the property link because I'm obviously looking in the wrong place.

I've replied to the person below you with links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39026946

The last one is 2 bedrooms for about $1000/month, fully furnished. Sure, it's stretching it, but a world of difference with your claim of $1800 for a small apartment in the context of digital nomads.

As someone who tried to find a suitable sub-$1000 rent in Seoul, I call your claim. Maybe you can provide online listings to counter?

Sure, as I live in such a place myself, and I got the contract last year. Since then housing prices have fallen in Seoul.

- Random building here https://fin.land.naver.com/articles/2402864693 Last March, 2 contracts at 2,000/63 and 2,000/80 respectively.

Still too high of a deposit? https://fin.land.naver.com/articles/2402982978 @ 1,000/90, building is less than 2 years old.

Need 2 bedrooms? Here: https://fin.land.naver.com/articles/2356138769

What's wrong with a country having its population getting lower in an overpopulated continent? South Korea is a highly educated and developed country and most families are very well happy with a single child.

With the advancement of technology, robotics, AI and so on I don't see how manpower is going to be absolutely necessary in the future either.

If the problem is retirement and how to finance it, don't worry, alternative ways exist to fix that, fearmongering isn't necessary.

No, you are not a "racial supremacist" if your goal is to keep social peace and prevent the society you live in to crumble with millions of individuals who don't share the same values as you. Death to the merchants.

> USA (if you get off H1B).

Funny joke. Everybody laughs.

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