digital nomads and the evolving world of remote work

Postdoctoral Researcher and digital nomad Dr. Kaisu Koskela on her nomad lifestyle, the rise of visas, and Estonia's credentials for location independent workers and entrepreneurs

Dr. Kaisu Koskela is a postdoctoral researcher at the Nijmegen School of Management at Radboud University. She is also part of the Radboud University Network on Migrant Inclusion. She is a digital nomad as well, one who is constantly on the move and whose life and research intersect. Originally from Finland, she has been working at Radboud since last year, where her work has focused on digital nomads and other forms of  remote working mobilities. In her new position, Koskela has taken an interest in studying the adoption, and rejection, of digital nomad visas.

As an anthropologist, Koskela immerses herself in her work, frequently traveling and setting up camps in different locations. She received her PhD at the University of Helsinki where she studied high-skilled migrants there. Koskela also received a master's degree from the Institute of Migration and Ethnic Studies at the University of Amsterdam and a double bachelor's degree in anthropology and international relations from the University of Malta. She has done fieldwork among tribes in Tanzania, and among American students in the Netherlands, as two examples. 

Koskela continues to churn out publications. One paper concerning digital nomad visas appeared in May in the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis. She also created the Digital Nomadism Research Index, a resource of peer-reviewed academic studies related to digital nomadism.

Koskela was in Estonia in May, where she participated in a panel on digital nomadism at the annual Latitude59 startup conference in Tallinn, an interesting discussion that led to the following interview about the phenomenon of digital nomadism and the role Estonia has played, first through launching the e-⁠Residency program and more recently via its Digital Nomad Visa.

Dr. Koskela, where are you based these days?

I've held this position with Radboud University for a year and a half, but I'm barely here, to be honest. At the moment, I'm in the Netherlands and I'm actually at a friend's house today, but so far this year, I've been here three weeks. I'm nomadic, and my research subject is also nomadic. That’s why I was in Asia for the first part of the year doing field work for this research. I was in Vietnam, Thailand, and Hong Kong. I try to be away for the European winter. It's not for me.

Did your interest in digital nomadism stem from your lifestyle, or was it just something you wanted to study?

Digital nomadism came into my life earlier. I have been nomadic in different ways for my whole adult life, so almost 30 years, but in different ways. I have studied, worked and lived abroad. The digital part came in when I started writing my PhD while travelling through Central America on chicken buses. To be honest, being location independent has become a bit of a non-negotiable for me. I will only consider jobs where I can have a choice of where to work from. I am interested in digital nomadism as a personal lifestyle choice, but also as a phenomenon, because it's fascinating. I would say that I live and breathe the lifestyle as well as the research.

There is quite a bit of research in this field by now, but a lot of it is done by PhD students, as they often have the freedom to move around. More and more academic publications are coming out and many will come out this year and next year. And we are starting to have longitudinal data as the whole phenomenon matures. So there is more interest in it also from academia. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became a better-known phenomenon in the media, and for governments too, as we can see from the Estonian case. That is when the Estonian Digital Nomad Visa was introduced. Digital nomadism became more accessible to many people, as they could suddenly work remotely from home as well as from abroad. But digital nomadism itself has been around for much longer, and I’m living proof of it myself.

One question that comes up in your work is how to define digital nomadism. It seems there are different categories, and using one term to describe them can be complicated.

Digital nomadism, as a term, is used by people very colloquially nowadays. Like it’s anyone who has a laptop and can work remotely. I have colleagues who say, ‘Oh, I was doing digital nomading this morning, I was at a cafe.’ But it’s not quite the same. From a personal perspective, it doesn’t matter: when I’m at a co-working space in Thailand, for example, I’m going to be surrounded by a lot of people just on 'workations', meaning they live completely sedentary lives normally, but they've decided to escape the northern winter and go for one or two months of working from there. There are other people who made Thailand their home, and they live there while still working remotely to their companies elsewhere. These are not officially digital nomads, but it doesn’t really matter. We all occupy the same spaces, physically at the coworking but also socially in our free time.

But from the perspective of my research and the perspective of governments and policy makers, it does really matter, because if someone is, let's say, a digital nomad, they will be someone who is more or less continuously on the move and doesn't have a permanent home base. Therefore they're going to be in a very different legal position when they are crossing borders. And they have to consider where they're paying taxes, where they get their social security, or where they get healthcare from. These are not considerations for someone who's taking one month to work remotely from Thailand instead of their home office, and then returning to their permanent place of residence. That person, from a policy perspective, is not much different than a tourist going to Thailand for one month. We must make the difference, although it sometimes feels futile to try and separate people that are essentially doing the same thing, but there is a whole range of ways of being able to combine work and travel. Digital nomadism is just one of them, but probably the most complex from this policy perspective.

Let's talk about the pandemic, because it does seem like it changed the game. But why did it take the pandemic to change things? All of this was possible before the pandemic.

I think employers were afraid that if they let people work at home, they wouldn't know what they were doing. This seems ridiculous now because the proof is in the pudding, right? The pandemic prompted a worldwide trial on whether or not people would work if they weren't in the office. There have been mixed reviews of this. Some studies say they work even better, others say no. There's also a backlash now, because companies, especially in the US, are starting to call people into the office. In everyone's mind, it wasn't completely successful. When it comes to digital nomadism, there has been a backlash against that now too, because there isn't a completely legal structure to be on the road all the time and employed by a company elsewhere. So companies are worried about their own liabilities if they let their employers work remotely globally.

I think we're at an interesting stage where we realize that people can work remotely and from abroad, but the way legal structures work, especially in the European context in terms of social security payments, work and employer rights, it doesn't support continuously moving across borders just yet.

But countries have tried to resolve this in different ways. Estonia was the first to offer e-⁠Residency, which is now a decade old. At first it almost seemed like a gimmick, remember, Edward Lucas was the first Estonian e-⁠resident, but now it's quite popular.

I was just checking on the stats today, and there are more than 100,000 e-⁠residents now, and around 30,000 companies were born out of the program. That's a sizable number.

There are other countries that have tried to offer this, but Estonia is by far the best known, and they have done a good job of branding it. And it is a very good product, but it does not solve the mobility issues of full-time digital nomadism. But I think it meets a demand that was already there for many of the more business-related issues when it comes to working without borders. They also came up with it so early, which shows that someone in the government had the foresight to do this. That's kind of Estonia in a nutshell. I would say, as a Finn, Estonia used to be a country we saw as our little brother, one that was similar but a little behind us in certain things. Now I would say it's reversed and that Finland is on the periphery in this regard.

There are competitive programs and people shop around. Portugal has been mentioned.

Yes, but when we are discussing digital nomad visas and other related physical residency permits that have made Portugal a popular location for digital nomads and remote workers, they are very different things. They don't offer what e-⁠Residency offers, which is a chance to set up a company in Estonia. Estonian e-⁠Residency is proven. People know people who have it, and they know how it works. It's fast and simple to do and you don't even need to step foot in Estonia. For a lot of people it's a miracle that you can do this and be completely online. And of course because it's an EU country and in the eurozone. This has huge benefits for them.

Something that's come up in your research is that states have started to adjust to the new reality of there being a sizable pool of these digital nomads, and there have been policies to attract them, but that these overtures have not actually been successful. It seems like an issue that's half bureaucratic and half psychological. People who have been doing things the same way for years are unlikely to change their ways. If you can keep working and travelling the way you do with a tourist visa, then why not just continue to do so?

I wouldn’t say psychological, but I would say it’s partially an emotive reaction to not wanting to apply for a DNV as the whole psyche of digital nomadism relies on freedom of movement. A residency permit, which the majority of the DNVs are, basically goes against this. To put it in numbers, an average digital nomad would change location every 1-2 months; an average DNV is 1-2 years. They are just not a very good match.

I do think these visas are good products for people who want to relocate to a country but happen to have a remote job. Digital nomadism is not something that everyone wants to do. Most people would like to lead more sedentary lives, but maybe experience living in another country for a period of time. In Estonia, you can now do that for up to a year on the digital nomad visa. This is a way to go there and try living there without having to find a local employer and/or giving up your already existing job or clients. It's something that should be in every country's visa repertoire. There should be a visa that allows you to get a temporary residency permit that is usually based on work, but with the work in this case being performed for an entity based somewhere else.

Do you think that there will be an evolution of these kinds of programs, or at some point the states are going to say, well, not enough people applied, so we're just going to kill it?

I think it depends completely on the people in charge, and how visionary they are about this. We both already know that Estonia is quite visionary.  There's already these countries, Estonia included, who are making new versions of their visas, because they have learned and they want to improve on it. Estonia is apparently lowering the income threshold, which, granted, is too high. It's currently something like €4500 a month, which, for Estonia, is not really justifiable.

I think that among the countries who actually invested in this and see a future in this and maybe believe that remote working will have a future, there is a growing future. They are adapting the visas, because the visas came out quite quickly during the pandemic and during an unusual time, so based on a policy logic of those times. It's time to upgrade them now, if they are serious about them. At the same time, there's a number of these programs that have just been forgotten, and, in fact, are not even in effect anymore. A lot of them came out as quick solutions during the COVID-19 pandemic to attract remote workers, especially in the Caribbean countries. Cabo Verde is another very good example of this phenomenon. They came up with their Digital Nomad Visa and it was highly publicized, but in effect, the actual visa doesn't even exist.

What are the reasons for digital nomadism? Do people not want to work in offices?

There is a generational issue, where the next generation already knows from the age they enter the workforce that the office and your job don't have to overlap. They know there's a separation between what they do and where they do it. For them it's a no-brainer. This only leads to remote work being more popular, as people want the flexibility and there is demand for that, and some are offering that.

The leap from remote working to digital nomadism is to do with the sense of adventure and just wanting to see the world, but there is also the cost of living. Consider some US cities, where your rent is $4,000 a month in San Francisco or New York. Imagine how you could live for the same amount in some Southeast Asian countries? Also, consider that people can actually not afford to live in the cities where their employers are based.

I do think digital nomadism will continue to evolve as there has been huge media focus on it. It's hard to say how many people are even doing it, but we talk about it so much more that we used to. It hasn't exploded, in that everyone is doing it, nor will they. It's still a very niche group of people out there who have really made this their lifestyle.