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Comment by howLongHowLong | Hacker News Reader

For one, because if there are enough people to pay higher prices, the market will reflect that and the locals will have to deal with the new costs despite the fact that there are no local jobs paying enough to afford these things. So yeah for people who are already merchants (likely a minority) it's great; everyone else gets poorer. Thus, inequality increases. This is already playing out in US cities.

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I won't pretend to know about this stuff. What I can tell you is that, since covid and the advent of remote work, so many countries have been rushing to launch some sort of "digital nomad" visa, precisely to attract this new type of worker. So clearly they've determined the model to be a net positive for the economy.

I cannot pretend to have an adequate breadth of geopolitical knowledge on this topic nor an understanding of the underlying reasons behind the various governments and the advent more recent "nomad visas".

However my knee-jerk reaction is that, the various programs governments will incentivize regarding foreign investment and relocation are not necessarily in the best economic or social interests of the locals for a given area, despite that governments intent.

One story I recall from earlier this year was regarding Lisbon and the backlash against their visa [1]. From the article it's obvious there were other (tax) incentives that existed prior to the nomad visa, however it appears to me that the visa was a turning point in public discourse on the topic, as it incentivized highly paid individuals to relocate to Lisbon (4x the average Portuguese salary).

Though I don't disagree that it could still have been weighed by the government and determined it to be a net-positive still.

[1] : https://www.politico.eu/article/portugal-digital-nomads-bubb...

Portugal has been handing out extremely desirable EU residency to very wealthy people for more than 10 years, in exchange of real estate investment. I don't blame them, together with Greece they were the hardest hit by the last global crisis. But of course that was going to noticeably drive prices up. A lot (most?) of those investments are now airbnbs which is the real problem they have. I don't think this can be compared with the recent wave of nomad visas that are little more than extended tourist permits.

If foreign money decides to entirely stop spending in developing economies and only spends money in developed economies, it seems like the outcome would be even worse. As in, developing economies will never develop and developed economies will continue to hoard all the wealth.

If they're spending money into a local economy, that means the money is flowing into the local economy.

> merchants

hire a whole panoply of people as their business increases.

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