No one wants to work abroad anymore
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William Fischer was in Peru, about to embark on a motorcycle tour around South America, when he got an offer he couldn't refuse — a job offer, that is. A US-based fintech startup reached out in spring 2024, and Fischer was intrigued. The only hiccup: They were 100% in office, no exceptions. The mandate didn't jibe with his LatAm-by-bike plan, or the digital nomad lifestyle he'd lived since 2021, working remotely while traveling to Spain, Mexico, and South Africa, among other locales. He tried to negotiate with his soon-to-be employer, asking to split time between New York and South America and pointing out that he'd already successfully worked remotely for two other companies, but the firm wouldn't budge.
Ultimately, Fischer decided the startup opportunity was too good to pass up, especially since the company was offering juicy stock options. So he packed it in and headed to New York. "I think you could argue I took a pay cut because of the tax increases and the cost-of-living differential that occurred," he says. "In my case, I did it because of the equity potential."
For now, the motorcycle tour is on the back burner — the bike is still sitting in Peru.
The pandemic jumbled the global labor market, causing big shifts in how and where people worked. It gave way to the explosion of remote work, which afforded workers an unprecedented opportunity to move around. Some people adopted a full-on digital nomad lifestyle, while others just quietly typed from the beach in Mexico for a month. Countries launched special visas to lure in footloose foreigners and make up for lost tourism traffic. In the immediate wake of the pandemic, people picking up jobs in other countries surged, too, as travel restrictions were lifted and cross-border movement normalized. The superhot job market also meant more workers and businesses were looking abroad for prospects.
Now the party's over in terms of working abroad. Return-to-office mandates have dampened the digital nomad phenomenon, and many companies are paying closer attention to workers' comings and goings. International job searches are slowing, too, as economic uncertainty takes hold and some countries tighten their immigration policies. Part of the swing back to a more "normal" work arrangement is people staying in their home countries, including many white-collar workers who only recently got their first taste of freedom, locationwise.
Globalization isn't going away, but it's in a cooling-off period that may lead to more workers staying put.
A recent analysis from the jobs platform Indeed found that job seekers' interest in foreign roles declined steeply between 2024 and 2025. Looking at job posting clicks from IP addresses outside the country of the job in question, Indeed found that the global postpandemic surge had reversed to pre-2020 levels. The reversal shows up in a slew of countries around the globe — including the US, Canada, Germany, and Australia.
"We're seeing less dynamic labor mobility, really, globally," says Cory Stahle, an economist at Indeed.
Stahle attributes the drop-off to economic and political factors. Hiring in general has slowed, no matter where you are, and the cost of living has increased, making moving abroad onerous and expensive. Stahle says international roles in tech, architecture, and knowledge work are where the job seeker drop-off has been most acute, which tracks, given the "white-collar recession." "Why keep looking for jobs if the jobs are increasingly not there because of the slowing labor markets?" he says.
"We did see a postpandemic surge in shortages and labor migration as things opened up again," says Kate Hooper, a senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute. "And then that sort of settled down a little bit. In some cases, that was linked to a little bit of an economic downturn, but in other cases it was also tied to a more saturated labor market."
If you get laid off in your own country, at least you can go back to your parents'.
She offers up the example of Europe, which has seen a slowing economy, a decline in arrivals from outside the continent, and a wave of refugees from Ukraine. "Some employers are actually looking to hire from among that population, rather than necessarily opening up to international recruitment, which is a bit more expensive," she says.
More restrictive immigration policies from some countries, including the UK, Canada, and the US, could be keeping foreign workers out. But even for countries that have put in place policies trying to welcome foreigners, such as Germany, that pitch may not make it to job seekers. "It takes time for some of this information to trickle down," Hooper says.
Overall, it may just seem like a safer bet for some workers to stay put. That's the case for Arghya Das, a supply chain consultant who spent years studying and working in the US before returning to his home country of India in 2020. Dealing with the US visa process had become taxing, and he started getting some job offers that made him consider moving back. He was never hell-bent on living in America for the rest of his life, anyway. One of his friends, also from India, just got laid off from Microsoft, and he's scrambling to find another job so he can stay in Seattle, where he's got a wife and a mortgage. "If you get laid off in your own country, at least you can go back to your parents'," Das says.
Uncertainty may have many workers reranking their priorities. In a recent survey of 5,000 workers worldwide by Randstad, a staffing agency, two-thirds of respondents said they prioritized employability — meaning the ability to stay relevant and secure — over the ability to work remotely. More than half said they would rather control their work hours than their work locations.
Remote work during the pandemic opened up a lot of possibilities for working from abroad. A supertight labor market also made it hard for companies to be too demanding of their workforces, so they loosened the reins when it came to monitoring people's whereabouts. The digital nomad trend became so popular in some places that there was a backlash from locals against foreign squatters. The good news for those locals is that many of their not-so-welcome visitors are now being called back home.
Return-to-office mandates mean fewer opportunities to work from elsewhere — you can't commute from Spain to San Francisco, whether you have to be in the office five days a week or two. When companies had to compete harder for workers, remote work was one way to sweeten the deal. A labor market that's less favorable to workers means many employers feel that they can pull back on those types of enticements.
There are very few companies that actually let you work from anywhere.
Even companies that allow remote work aren't so keen on it in places where they don't have offices. When the pandemic hit, many companies didn't have a lot of experience with remote workforces and treated working abroad as a gray area. They've since gotten better at monitoring their employees' locations and putting in place more specific guidelines about where people can be and for how long. It's not just a control issue — though many workers would argue it is — but also about compliance, says Brendan Coggan, the senior vice president of global services at Envoy Global, an immigration services consultancy. Many countries have started to more tightly monitor what foreigners are doing on their visits to ensure they're following immigration laws, not overstaying their visas, and paying taxes where required.
"Governments are able to actually better manage who's coming in, who's coming out, have all their biometric data, an easier way of tracking, and then AI is coming," he says.
Many countries have also formalized their pitch to foreign workers. Digital nomad visas offer remote workers a path that's more kosher, compliancewise. Hooper, from the Migration Policy Institute, says these types of visas haven't seen an enormous amount of uptake. They're helpful for extended stays, not for people traveling for a month or two and combining work and tourism. They also take time to get, and money, which a true digital nomad who bounces from place to place may not be willing to deal with. To some extent, the digital nomad visas are a marketing tactic. Even if the numbers aren't high, digital nomad visas "plant the flag, in a way, saying that we've got all this infrastructure in place that allows you to work remotely," Hooper says.
Marisa Meddin, a cofounder of Beach Commute, which helps people find remote jobs, says a lot of people got a "taste of freedom" over the past few years and feel like employers are now ripping that away. Her business tries to get people work-from-anywhere opportunities without them having to sneak around, which are usually at smaller operations. "There are very few companies that actually let you work from anywhere," she says. A big barrier is taxes. "That's why so many of the big companies are like, 'We can't even deal with it,'" she adds.
Some companies are embracing more business travel in lieu of sending (or allowing) employees to work full time in other countries. It's often more cost-effective, and it lowers their risk of running into legal trouble.
"People are working from other countries a lot, just in a different way," says Charlotte Wills, a partner at Fragomen, an immigration services firm. "Maybe in a more short-term way, for a temporary reason, before they either go back to their normal country of residence or where they're employed."
To some extent, the cat is out of the bag on people working from other countries. Globalization is a fact of the economy, and technology makes it easier for workers to be wherever, from freelancers to full-timers. But the cat is — kicking and screaming and scratching — going a little bit back into the bag.
Some of this is a natural cycle. People do the expat thing for a while, get tired of it, and go home. Two of the guys traveling in Fischer's cohort of digital nomads have also packed it in — one moved in with his girlfriend in Atlanta; another bought a house in Florida. Another made the official move to Spain with a digital nomad visa — he met a girl, the classic story.
Kristin Wilson, a blogger and consultant on working and living abroad, has planned her life destination by destination since 2012. She's finally slowed down and has been in Miami for about a year. "I got tired of living out of a suitcase, living out of backpacks, starting and stopping," she says. Ironically, she's become more set in place as her business grows, thanks to the surge in the pandemic-driven interest in working and living abroad, which resulted in the publication of her book "Digital Nomads for Dummies." Still, Wilson recognizes the growth won't be linear, and there's a level of normalization going on. "Remote work is here to stay, but the method of implementation during the pandemic was just completely contrary to the normal human rate of change and evolution," she says. "We're just kind of going back to a new baseline."
International job opportunities are still there, but workers may be more hesitant to grab onto them, and companies may be thinking twice about the rigamarole of bringing on someone from abroad. The brief WFH renaissance and the global opportunities afforded there appear to be a little bit over. Even if your company doesn't have an RTO mandate, it's probably paying closer attention to the IP address you're signing in from and rolling back that unacknowledged "don't ask, don't tell me if you're low-key in Colombia" stance it took in 2022.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
