Americans and other white people with strong passports are absolutely going to drive me to a bottle of whiskey with the perpetual, “my company shouldn’t complain when I work with no proper visa or authorisation from a foreign county, without asking” comments, and I’m a huge remote work advocate.
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@hacks4pancakes
I am a Canadian on vacation in Japan right now and it hadn't even slightly occurred to me that i might technically not even be allowed to answer emails from work, so TIL...
@hacks4pancakes I'm a white male with a UK passport. I check if I need a travel visa every time I leave the country. I would do the same for working/business visas too if I intended to work somewhere else.
You don't show up unannounced (with travel visa) and either take work (work visa + tax) or freeload (business visa + tax) from your hosts...
@hacks4pancakes of course you're substantially correct. But I would caution that the specific definition of "substantially work" you're giving, especially the "training and meetings" bit, is specific to the US. Other countries may have more or less liberal definitions. I had the impression European countries generally focus more about the length of the trip than the specific activities
Cheers! Good thread.
🍾
(why is there only a Campagne bottle emoji and no Whiskey, is this a French conspiracy?)
@hacks4pancakes Not just visas: we had someone who needed to visit her home country for a few weeks, and needed to work for us while there. The visa wasn't necessary, because she was still a citizen there. But there was a whole conversation about insurance -- the company's business insurance didn't cover that case.
@hacks4pancakes As a Costa Rican working for US companies, if you’re invited to headquarters you need to say you are coming for BUSINESS and not WORK. I believe you can receive training but not provide training to others on your B1 B2
@hacks4pancakes it was always fun when I traveled to the US with my wife.
“Traveling together?”
“Yep”
“Business or pleasure?”
“Both”
Agent looks at us
“Let me guess, you are business, she’s pleasure?”
“Yep”
“Checked the right boxes in esta?”
“Yep”
The last question sounds innocent, but I don’t want to know what would have happened if I’d have asked which boxes he means,… (and we travel on easy mode with a German passport)
@hacks4pancakes I've seen people (from the US mostly) just casually assuming they can move to any country they like "because their passport doesn't require them to get a visa".
That said, I'm pretty sure that assumption isn't limited to the US, given the shock expressed by some British people after brexit.
@hacks4pancakes I've seen people (from the US mostly) just casually assuming they can move to any country they like "because their passport doesn't require them to get a visa".
I'm pretty sure that assumption wasn't limited to the US, given the shock expressed by some British people after brexit.
Heh. Strong passport holder here. I worked for a company that had an international presence. We would have a company wide conference somewhere that we had lovingly nicknamed a "Work Week".
We were told, in absolutely no uncertain terms, by the company that when we traveled abroad we were to call the meeting a "conference" and ABSOLUTELY UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES refer to it as a "work week" or use any reference to this being an employment based gathering.
Precisely because of what you're talking about.
(I get the feeling that a lot of folk haven't found out about that particular detail yet, but may gain an unwanted "learning opportunity" in the future.)
@hacks4pancakes [sweats in tax implications]
@hacks4pancakes lol trying working in germany for 30days as a digital nomad and get caught. someone will suddenly realize the tax implications really quick.
@0ddj0bb they're already telling me "well, you're wrong', and I want to tell them to go try this fr
In general you need a visa or travel authorisation to go to another country. If you have a strong passport it’s often defacto or in principle on arrival for tourists, so you don’t even think about it. You might have a fairly rapid ETA on an easy app. This is privilege. Most on earth need papers.
There’s also a spectrum of what ‘need’ means. I went to a conference in China a few years ago. China explicitly doesn’t allow this on a tourist visa. I got the correct kind of visa, which required an invitation letter with the official stamp pf the organisers, sending my passport to the Chinese embassy, and cost a few hundred quid (China has a policy that visas for your country cost the same amount as your county’s visas for Chinese people and my government views visas from Chinese people as a revenue source so charges a lot for them). The process was complicated but we made it fast by getting a travel agent to check the paperwork and send it to friendly people in the embassy.
I was quite glad that I wasn’t yet married at that point because the visa application required enumerating all of the Chinese people in your family and my mother in law was Cantonese and had numerous siblings and I have no idea who most of them are.
When I arrived, I discovered most people at the conference were there on tourist visas.
And, of course, the CCP didn’t do anything because they understand the value of having prestigious international conferences in China and giving the attendees bad stories to tell on the way home is a good way of discouraging that. But everyone there on a tourist visa was in violation of their visa and 100% reliant on the CCP and local petty bureaucrats agreeing that arresting them was bad publicity that offset any benefit and behaving rationally. I might make that kind of bet in the PRC because they are deeply technocratic and the government tends to think long term and at scale (I disagree with their goals but I respect their tactics), I definitely wouldn’t in the USA where every layer of government and law enforcement is adversarial and driven by short-term local gains.
@hacks4pancakes yeah… though I’d go much further and say that those privileged countries MADE it into a privilege. This papers please culture was more or less created in response to wars, as a “temporary” measure. Our system of literally judging everyone by the cover of a book is immoral 🤬
@ianthetechie A few people have commented on the unfair hierarchy and human rights violations of how borders are structured and yes, that is a very important other conversation, for sure.
Business Visitor is the class of visa aside that most Redditors and social commentators from America have experienced. Similar low bar for strong passports. But the activities you can do are very limited and structured. Most prohibit any actual productive work. You can go to meetings and take calls. Sometimes train. You can usually take casual emails or calls for your job at home.
@hacks4pancakes Yes! And the first time this affected us Swedes was during the first Trump admin. Suddenly there was a flurry of internal directions sent out to ONLY say you were going to have meetings when we travelled to our US offices for work. I was managing a department and worked out of a US office one week every month. Colleagues who had admitted to doing that were turned away at US immigration.
Note that neither class allows substantial productive work even for your employer back home. There’s a visa class for remote workers to do that in some countries and it’s a digital nomad visa. It’s often a real application, time bounded, and may have tax obigations. Not all allow it at all.
@hacks4pancakes When I lived in Canada, some of my co-workers were on visas that allowed them to work but they couldn’t take training courses because that would’ve implied that their visas were issued improperly.
i.e. they couldn’t take a fun cooking class at the local community college because that would mean they couldn’t’ve been brought in on a visa that was issued based on their talents/skills.
So many people don’t seem to realize what a confusing bureaucratic nightmare pretty much all border crossing is for people around the world.
You can’t just do your remote job in a foreign country without the right visa. Several South East Asian counties are booting out Americans and Europeans for visa violations like this. When I moved to Australia, which has no digital nomad, I had to fly to New Zealand to not violate my visa if I just wanted to give an hour long online talk for America.
@hacks4pancakes well, yeah, my passport is full of business-travel visas, mostly to mainland China and Thailand
