Give digital nomads a place in the sun
Growth of remote working means country can attract location-independent workers
One shining beacon in the general miasma of 2020 has been the widespread adoption of remote working. I ve ’ said it before and will continue beating that drum: we ve had the
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capability to support remote work for ages, but an oldfashioned view of managing
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workers rather than the state
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of technology has been hold
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ing us back. Turns out, when we all had to stay away from the office, miraculously we could, and the world did not fall apart. This is the one lesson I hope we take along after the current iteration of end times.
But we could take this lesson even further, opening up the country to an interesting subset of workers: digital nomads. This esoteric-sounding category is really just location-independent
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workers such as freelancers
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and the self-employed, creatives and independent consultants. They can work from anywhere with a reliable internet connection, and do.
Armed with a laptop and a smartphone, many South Africans have recently swapped, say, traffic in Broadacres, Johannesburg, for surfing in Bali. Estonia of all places has been a
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trendsetter in this regard. It isn t
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the first to offer freelancefriendly work options, but it seems to have done it so well that Estonia is almost synonymous with the term. It first launched an e-residency
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option, which allows people to be resident in the country only in virtual or electronic terms. The applicant now has access to the EU market and Estonia to your taxes. Win-win.
But from August it has opened up the digital nomad
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category, which lets people live and work in Estonia while technically working for a company back home or elsewhere. You pay an application fee, naturally (€80-€100), and must have evidence of a monthly income of at least 3,504 gross. You can then
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qualify for up to 90 days Schengen-area movement out of 180 consecutive days on the visa.
Georgia (the country, not the US state), Costa Rica, Mexico, Bermuda, Norway and a handful of others have opened up this category too citing both a
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more contemporary understanding of how people work and the need to spend longer times in countries if one has to account for possible quarantine time. Getaway magazine recently ran a lovely little listicle
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on the topic.
Meanwhile, while our SA freelancers are weighing up Bermuda vs Barbados, our own immigration policy is stuck in the analogue age to our
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detriment.
I know we are inclined to ring-fence local jobs for local people. With our woeful employment statistics we need every job opportunity and
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income stream possible, but freelancers and digital nomads are self-employed. They mostly bring that work with them, with their lovely tourist dollars. These are (usually) the young and upwardly mobile crowd that nearly everyone with something to sell wants to target.
If you come to SA on a tourist
visa you are not legally allowed to work here, but let me tell you they are here anyway. If you hang around the coffee shops and upmarket backpackers of Cape Town, you ll find them.
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This tourist visa category
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does allow for business ”,
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defined as meetings, interviews, training, conferences and the like, but not work. And, of course, there are options for people with scarce skills and corporate-sponsored work permits. Foreign journalists, for example, can work in the country (for fewer than 90 days) if they have a visitor s visa with
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short-term work authorisation.
But this reflects a definition of work from a prior century. If I m
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here for a conference, can I fin
ish off that other proposal I was working on unrelated to my
— being here? Can I respond to routine e-mails from the office? There are presumably no immigration e-mail police checking this out. Only the most maniacal punch-drunk cartoon bureaucrat would ever try to enforce this, but on paper these fall outside the tourist visa ambit.
Incorporating a new visa
type such as one for digital nomads would legitimise the bright young things who want to be here anyway and for whom
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technology is the real passport.
All of this would require some strategic thinking and rejigging at home affairs a
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department desperately in need of a digital shot in the arm. I am a techno-optimist, but biometrics and blockchain will make travel and immigration safer and easier to manage. This is the promise of civic tech-type innovations, and I ve high hopes for
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such a digitally transformed home affairs.
WHILE FREELANCERS ARE WEIGHING UP BERMUDA VS BARBADOS, OUR POLICY IS STUCK IN THE ANALOGUE AGE
ALL OF THIS WOULD REQUIRE SOME STRATEGIC THINKING AND REJIGGING AT HOME AFFAIRS
Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.