As the global ESL industry moves online, countries need to adapt visa rules

There was a time, not that long ago, that almost everyone that worked in ESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) was a job that was almost exclusively something that people did in-person. We would hunt around for jobs in various parts of the world and for those of us that were qualified, there were some really good-paying jobs that at least from a remuneration point of view, were very satisfying. Normally these jobs, at least as far as my experiences in the part of the world that I live in, were in China, Japan, and Korea. I never took these jobs, but they would pay what a lot of people consider to be a decent western wage and it could actually be considered a career.

Jobs of the sort that I am qualified for the "in-person" teaching experience pay considerably less. In South East Asia a person without a degree in Education can expect to make anywhere from $1000 to $2000 a month. It depends on where and how expensively you live your life, but this can be more than enough money to get by, but normally not enough to really save anything for the future.

These days, I know as many people that teach ESL as I did 5 years ago, but now almost everyone works either entirely, or at least in part, online.

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This was solidified during the Covid times that rocked the world and for a time there, it was the only option even for people that were gainfully employed full-time by a local school. So effective this process was that when the pandemic was over, that most of these people remained in an online teaching position even when schools re-opened. Many people who were laid off during the lockdowns chose to abandon their in-person job and opt to teach exclusively online from that point forward. This presents a number of opportunities as well as some caveats for those of us that depend on our jobs in order to maintain a visa.

The thing is, most of these online English companies are available to audiences and students globally and while they are companies based out of certain countries, they do not operate towards one particular country.

The upsides are that by teaching online, you can actually make a lot more money than you could with your 8-5 in person job. It is kind of up to you and your own abilities and how much interest you are able to generate towards your profile and in many ways it is similar to social media like Instagram. The more interesting you make your profile, and your ability to create good, informative, and entertaining "content", the more likely you are to be in high-demand. One friend of mine who had never taught English online ever before in his life found that he had a real knack for it during the lockdowns and now he doesn't even pursue any other jobs. He makes more than $20 an hour and does something like 6 hours teaching per day. Some days more than others but basically he is pulling down $600 to $800 a week. There is almost no chance you are going to see those sorts of numbers with ANY in-person teaching job that exists in Vietnam.

The major problem that exists with this kind of work is that since these companies are marketed all over the world and your students can be from Mexico to Oman, the various companies that offer this service generally speaking never offer work visas and wouldn't qualify for them even if they wanted to. The world has one foot in the past and one in the future. As an online teacher you have a difficult road ahead of you because there are very few countries that offer no-nonsense long-term visas to anyone who isn't filthy rich.

There isn't a single country that i am aware of that allows exceptions for people who work online and most countries have pretty stringent policies about how you can obtain a work visa if you are working online. Some countries offer this sort of "digital nomad" visa but they will also have a minimum salary requirement that is well above and beyond what anyone working in online teaching is ever going to make. The last I saw was one in some South East Asian country but the minimum salary requirement was over $100,000 a year. My friends and myself who consider making $100 a day a REALLY good day's work, don't even come close to meeting this threshold.

Therefore, we have the choice of changing countries every couple of months, getting a long-term visa by shady and untrue means, or by simply violating visa law. I know a lot of people right now that fall into the last category and I really think that governments could benefit by creating a program where online teachers could live and work out of their apartments legally and stay here or some other country in the long-term. Yet, there aren't any countries, at least in the part of the world that I live in, that offers this.

I believe that the global online teaching industry probably exists almost entirely because of people like myself and my friends. It would have to because while $600 a week is a great wage in this part of the world, it wouldn't be nearly enough money to exist in places such as USA or Canada which are the two countries whose economics I am most familiar with.

I can't really understand why governments don't address this issue. At any given point in time there are thousands of online English teachers pulling down many times the average citizen's monthly wage and they represent a really fantastic way to boost the economy of certain countries. We rent here, we eat and drink here, we buy stuff here. The only missing piece of the puzzle is that we do not qualify for legal residency. It seems to me that a group of people that are not taking jobs from the local economy - and I can totally understand why a country would need to protect that - shouldn't be allowed to legally stay and continue to put money into the economy that otherwise might not exist. There could be reasonings such as the fact that this demographic is capable of driving up prices for locals but at least in Vietnam, I don't see how that could be a factor. There is already so much development that we are far from a housing crisis. There's plenty to go around and in my particular neck of the woods it appears that the locals don't even want to live in the area that I live in. Basically everyone here is an expat, a tourist, or someone who works in the local foreigner-oriented customer base.

I feel as though by changing the visa rules to accommodate this large and growing segment of a population that everyone would end up winning in the end. Hell, the government could even tax my wages or charge me for a monthly fee for the pleasure of not having to worry about visas and I, and basically everyone I know, would gladly comply with it. We'll have to wait to see what the future holds but at the time of me writing this, I haven't seen any movement by any country to attempt to capitalize on this.