Nobody actually knows anyone who has been blacklisted in Vietnam

Just a quick catch-up on what I am talking about here. Earlier this year Vietnam dramatically overhauled their visa system for visitors making long-term stays without a work-permit almost impossible. In my previous entry I discussed how it is technically possible to stay for as long as you want to, but it's going to cost you a lot in terms of time traveling and also money. I haven't heard of anyone getting denied a visa to Vietnam, they have just been delayed a few days.

I have no idea what is going on inside the Vietnamese government but the end result of this is that people without work-permits or residency cards that can only be acquired via work-permits, marriage, or investment visas are opting to simply not get visas anymore.

The major fear or really the only one, that people who are taking this approach ever have is that they will be blacklisted for a long-period of time should they overstay for over 90 days.

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From the information that I bothered to gather, overstaying a visa almost anywhere in the world is not a jail-worthy offense and most countries won't ever bother with it unless the person in question doesn't have the finances to get out and pay a fine once caught. This country has published what the fine is and this is $800. I think that most people that are staying long-term have this amount of money and honestly, if you don't, what the hell are you doing here?

Blacklisting as far as I can tell from my research is largely a myth and according to some, it is an incredibly difficult thing to qualify for. It involves multiple layers of government in order to make it happen and this involves time and money that I believe the government here isn't actually interested in spending. Why would they spend thousands of dollars to blacklist someone when they can simply charge the person $800 and have them exit the country electively.

In the past few months I have been asking everyone that I know if they actually know a person who has been blacklisted from entry into Vietnam and I am very careful to say that "a story I saw on Facebook" doesn't count. Do you actually know someone who is not allowed to enter the country because of being blacklisted. After talking to hundreds of people, nobody knows anyone that even knows anyone personally that has ever been denied entry into this country via being on a blacklist.

Anyone that tries to look this up online will be inundated with fear reports that are put there by visa agencies and therefore they can not be trusted. These companies make money by perpetuating this fear and they try to make it sound like this blacklist is huge and is heavily enforced. Seeing as how I personally know more than a dozen people that have overstayed their visas and none of them are blacklisted, I'm going to go ahead and make the statistical guess that you have to do more than just not comply with visa rules to end up on this list that nobody I know has ever known anyone to end up on.

Case in point: There is a guy I recently met who after overstaying in Vietnam for nearly 3 years decided to go back to California for a while. He paid the $800, got told "bad boy!" by some officials for a day or two, then got on his plane to USA as you normally would. He was NOT escorted there by deportation police and was given 6 weeks to get his affairs in order by virtue of the fact that it took so long for them to actually process his exit visa. He said the Immigration Police actually seemed a bit pleased to be receiving the $800 and that nobody threatened him the entire time.

About 6 months later he was back in Da Nang having a beer with us.

He said the very first time he went to the Vietnam embassy in California to apply for a new visa to Vietnam it was approved. He hadn't changed his name, he didn't get a new passport, and he didn't remove the exit visa that was clearly visible in his passport. He was never even asked about it. He is here now, and jokes about how he is just going to overstay every time he visits Vietnam.

I'm not trying to suggest that anyone should break laws and you should always try to comply with visa structures that exist anywhere in the world. All I am trying to say is that this scary "blacklist" that people talk about a lot, as far as I can tell, is a myth perpetuated by visa agents who have taken a big financial hit over the past few years from Covid.