From Guests to Contributors: How Countries Expect Nomads to Give Back

For most of the last decade, digital nomads occupied a convenient legal gray zone. Countries didn't have rules for them. Border officers didn't know what to do with them. And the nomads themselves — many of whom had been doing this since the 1990s — mostly just got on with it.

That era is ending.

Since 2020, a third of the world's nations have introduced some form of digital nomad visa or remote work permit. What was once an informal arrangement — a pale gray zone, as Dr. Kaisu Koskela puts it — is now becoming a structured policy area, with its own expectations, conditions, and increasingly, consequences for those who don't comply.

At Nomad Summit 2025 in Chiang Mai, Koskela — a Finnish academic, 17-year nomad, and policy advocate for remote work mobility — laid out what that shift actually means. Not just for visa paperwork, but for the relationship between nomads and the countries they move through.

Two Systems That Were Never Built for Nomads

Traditionally, countries have operated with two formalized categories of mobility: tourism and migration. Tourism is leisure, short-term, and generates immediate cash. Migration is work-related, typically invited, and serves a specific labor market need. Almost every permit system in the world was built around one of these two models.

Digital nomads fit neither cleanly.

They combine the travel patterns of tourism with the economic activity of work. They're not taking local jobs, but they're not just sightseeing either. For decades, countries simply didn't notice — or didn't care. When you're talking about a few thousand people shipping floppy disks across borders, it's not worth legislating.

COVID changed the scale of the problem. Remote work went mainstream almost overnight, and suddenly countries were facing a much larger population of people who were technically tourists but functionally workers. The response was fast and, in Koskela's assessment, often poorly designed: a wave of digital nomad visas rolled out from 2020 onward, many of them more marketing slogans from tourism ministries than actual legal frameworks.

They've matured since. But the underlying tension — nomads as a category that doesn't fit existing systems — remains.

Three Types of Remote Workers, Not One

Part of the confusion, Koskela argues, is that the term "digital nomad" gets applied to a much wider spectrum of people than it should. Her research distinguishes three distinct types of transnational remote worker:

Vocationers — people who live in one place and occasionally travel for a few weeks while working remotely. Functionally, this is a new form of tourism. They need a permit, but their primary purpose is leisure.
Digital nomads — people in continuous movement, with no fixed base, moving from location to location as a lifestyle. This is the group most people picture when they hear the term.
Remote working residents — people who relocate to another country on a long-term basis while keeping their remote income. These are, in most meaningful senses, immigrants — even if neither the individuals nor the countries like to use that word.

The distinction matters because countries are mostly not designing their visas for the middle category. The majority of permits currently on the market are long-term residency programs. Countries want people to stay — ideally for years, ideally becoming tax residents, ideally eventually staying for good.

The true nomad — the person bouncing between Chiang Mai, Lisbon, and Mexico City across the same year — is largely not who the policy is aimed at.

Thailand's DTV is the notable exception. Within its first eight months, it issued around 25,000 permits — vastly more than most comparable programs. Its design is genuinely nomad-friendly: multiple entries, no requirement for a permanent address, no forced tax residency. It's the only visa Koskela would describe as actually built for the way nomads live.

The Legal Status Question Is No Longer Ambiguous

For years, there was a reasonable debate about whether tourist visa conditions actually prohibited remote work. Those conditions were written before remote work existed. They were intended to prevent people from taking local jobs — not to restrict someone answering emails from a café for a company on another continent.

That argument has become harder to sustain.

Once a country creates a specific visa for remote work and a nomad chooses not to use it — entering instead on a tourist permit while actively working — the intent is clearer. The gray zone, Koskela says, is no longer pale gray. It hasn't been criminalized. Nobody is being prosecuted. But the trajectory is visible, and border controls have been tightening in multiple countries.

The practical implication is straightforward: use the visa that exists for your situation when one exists. The inconvenience of the paperwork doesn't change the underlying legal reality.

What Countries Actually Want in Return

This is where the talk shifts from legal compliance to something more interesting: the expectations that countries embed in these programs, whether nomads think about them or not.

Countries introduce remote work permits because they want something. The financial motivation is the most obvious — high-earning foreign nationals spending locally are economically attractive, particularly in off-season periods when tourist revenue drops. Nomads, because they're not constrained by school calendars or vacation windows, can fill months that traditional tourism never reaches.

But the ambitions go further for countries offering longer-term residency. They're looking at:

Tax revenue from new residents who become fiscal participants in the country
Human capital transfer — bringing in skilled people whose expertise might not exist domestically, particularly in tech and entrepreneurship
Startup and innovation ecosystem development, with foreign talent acting as a catalyst for local industries
Knowledge transfer to local youth, who benefit from access to internationally experienced professionals without having to emigrate to find them

Koskela's view is that nomads — the genuinely mobile ones — can bridge something the residency programs can't quite capture on their own. Because nomads return. They move in patterns. Chiang Mai in cool season, Vietnam or the islands as burning season arrives, back through the same circuit next year. That makes them more valuable to a destination than a one-time tourist, and more flexible than a permanent resident.

The economic argument for nomads, done right, is about filling geographic and seasonal gaps: the off-season towns, the inland cities, the places that rarely make the Instagram shortlist. And about the infrastructure that follows — co-working spaces, better internet, new service businesses — which outlasts any individual visitor.

The Backlash, and Where Responsibility Actually Sits

The anti-nomad demonstrations that hit Mexico City, Lisbon, and the Canary Islands over the past year didn't emerge from nowhere. They were a response to housing costs, displacement, and the visible presence of high-spending foreigners in neighborhoods that locals could no longer afford.

Koskela doesn't fully absolve the nomad community. Transnational gentrification is real. People earning European or American salaries and paying four times local rates for housing have a measurable effect on rental markets. That's not nothing.

But she's also careful about the scapegoating dynamic. The primary failure in most of these cases was policy: local governments that didn't protect affordable housing, that invited both nomads and surging tourist volumes without thinking through the combined pressure on infrastructure and real estate. The nomad influx became visible and politically convenient to blame. The underlying governance failures were harder to address.

Which doesn't mean nomads have no role to play. It means the role is more specific than carrying collective guilt for urban housing policy.

What Giving Back Actually Looks Like

Koskela closes with something practical — a list of behaviors that shift the nomad relationship with a destination from extractive to contributory. Not as moral instruction, but as a reframe: these are the choices that make the lifestyle sustainable, and that make nomads a positive presence rather than a political liability.

Go off-season. Go to places when they're not already overwhelmed. You get a better experience. The destination gets revenue when it actually needs it.
Go off the beaten path. The places dealing with over-tourism are the famous ones. There are hundreds of destinations that would genuinely benefit from the presence of a nomad community.
Spend on local services. Keep money in the neighborhood. Pay for the co-working space, the local café, the locally run tour. If you want those things to exist, the economics have to work.
Enter legally when you can. Use the visa that exists for your situation. Not every location has one, but where they do, using it is both legally correct and signals to governments that the model works.
Come back. Return visits compound. Each return deepens the relationship, increases the economic contribution, and builds the kind of ties that are genuinely different from tourism.
Bring your human capital. Volunteer. Teach. Share knowledge with local people, particularly younger ones, who have plenty to learn from internationally experienced professionals and no easy way to access that without leaving.

None of this is idealistic. It's an argument that nomads, precisely because of the privilege that enables the lifestyle — strong passports, strong paychecks, genuine geographic freedom — have more choices than most travelers. And that making better choices with those options is both the ethical thing and the strategically smart thing, at a moment when governments are increasingly deciding what kind of welcome nomads deserve.

Where This Is Heading

The direction of travel in global mobility policy is toward more structure, not less. Borders are tightening. Remote work is increasingly visible. Countries that once didn't notice nomads now have entire government departments managing them.

The nomad community's relationship with host countries was always an exchange — it just wasn't formalized. What's changing now is that the terms of that exchange are being written into law. Countries are specifying what they want, what they'll permit, and increasingly, what they won't allow.

Nomads who adapt to that reality — who use the right visas, choose destinations thoughtfully, and bring genuine value to the places they move through — will find that the exchange continues to work. Those who treat the lifestyle as a set of freedoms without conditions may find those conditions being applied anyway, just less pleasantly.

The freedom to move was never absolute. It's just becoming more explicit about that.

Sources & References

Digital Nomads Around the World — Large Facebook community for digital nomads, referenced in the talk for discussions on tightening border controls
Destination Thailand Visa (DTV) — Thailand's long-stay visa designed for remote workers and digital nomads
Immigration New Zealand — New Zealand's immigration authority, whose tourist entry now permits remote work up to specified hours
UK Visas and Immigration — UK's visa authority; the UK updated tourist entry conditions to allow remote work
Estonia e-Residency — Estonia's digital residency program, noted as the only country to have introduced a digital nomad visa framework before COVID