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When the world shut down in 2020, Sam Anthony lost the freewheeling life she’d built — full-time house-sitting, stringing together gigs while moving from country to country and city to city. She ended up in Buffalo, New York, a place where she’d gone to high school and sworn never to return. There, despite her initial reluctance, she regrouped, crashing in a student apartment and finding a remote writing job for a travel site.
This year that scaffolding collapsed, too. Google’s algorithm changes and AI-generated snippets in search undercut the site, and the team was downsized. “I keep hearing, ‘We used to hire writers and editors, but now we just use AI,’” Anthony, now 34, told Quartz.
The digital-nomad dream didn’t vanish overnight — it just got smaller. As more Americans look abroad for relief from high housing costs, political rancor, and burnout, demand for visas and remote work is surging, but so are the obstacles. Anthony sees a bottleneck now, in part because the very jobs that once allowed for location independence — content writing, editing, website maintenance, other freelance digital work — are being squeezed by AI.
The online economy of website traffic has been shaken by AI, too, making it harder to earn a living from small online businesses. At the same time, many of the countries that built “nomad visa” programs are quietly tightening their rules, while employers that tolerated far-flung teams are pulling people closer. Borderless work is running into borders, from the economic to the legal.
The result is a paradox: Just as the new American dream has become leaving America, it’s getting harder to do so.
The return of 'butts in seats'?
According to Dana Sumpter, an associate professor at Pepperdine University who studies remote work, “we’re in evolution, not revolution” — not a “complete retraction” but a retreat from pandemic-era remote norms. “There was an extreme push for millions of jobs to be shifted to be done remotely, during a distraught and challenging time period,” Sumpter said. This coincided with labor-market strength that saw employees holding the cards. Now, the pendulum is swinging back, with employers in a stronger position and, in turn, tightening their flexible-work policies.
What concerns Sumpter is the extent to which this corporate tightening of remote-work policies is "done deliberately,” she said, rather than as kneejerk returns to the familiar. “A lot of organizations are bouncing back to what’s comfortable — ‘butts in seats’ — without asking what the work actually requires,” she said. The pushback has some rational motives — mentoring, problem-solving, culture — and some cynical ones, including sunk real-estate costs and managerial control, she said.
Inside the labor market, supply and demand are moving against the dream, too. “Working on a U.S. salary while traveling full-time is becoming more of a dream than a reality,” said Jan Hendrik von Ahlen of JobLeads, a platform which tracks millions of job postings. He explained that the share of fully remote roles is now a thin slice of listings, with on-site roles now dominating again.
Border policy is shifting, too
“Countries that once welcomed digital nomads — like Portugal and Spain — are changing tax or visa rules, making it harder to stay long-term,” said Olivier Wagner, a CPA who advises expatriates through his firm 1040 Abroad. Clients who once flew under the radar are now being asked to register, insure, and pay like residents, he added. It’s not a crackdown so much as normalization: fewer easy loopholes, more paperwork, and longer stays over quick border-hops.
The countries that still work for expats? Anil Polat, a veteran nomad who runs the travel-tech site foXnoMad, points to Albania, Vietnam, Uruguay, Thailand, and Mexico, though he adds that local sentiment varies city by city. In his view, the digital-nomad lifestyle isn’t dead, but it’s maturing into something more bureaucratic and less frictionless.
The practical advice is changing, too, Polat explained. Instead of stringing together 90-day stints and hoping no one notices, nomads are getting real residencies, paying into local systems, and staying longer. Perhaps it’s not as Instagram-ready, but it is more sustainable, and not nearly as vulnerable to a platform tweaking an algorithm or AI snippeting traffic away.
For some groups, of course, the loss of flexibility and RTO mandates hits harder, far beyond a lifestyle preference. Sumpter’s research shows caregivers and disabled workers gained the most from pandemic-born flexible arrangements. So did employees from underrepresented groups who found their homes an effective refuge from office politics.
“When women were forced back without a valid reason, they felt disrespected and left,” Sumpter said. “If a company is going to roll back remote, it needs a very good justification — and real support for those affected.”
What the future looks like
Still, looking to the future, Sumpter struck a cautiously optimistic note. “I'm hopeful that, as good research continues to be conducted on the effects, both positive and negative, of remote work arrangements, organizations will pay attention and apply evidence-based tactics to make the best policy choices.” In the best-case scenario, she foresees an era in which “we can grow beyond 'ideal worker norms' and acknowledge that work has changed, meaning that the 8-5 Monday to Friday routine and continuously being 'on' in overworking doesn't serve anyone."
For Sam Anthony, the former travel writer, the future does indeed look different than her freewheeling past, but no less intentional. Anthony recently bought a century-old duplex in Buffalo, where she’s renovating one unit to rent out and planning to spend part of each snow-packed winter abroad. The project, she said, gives her both stability and flexibility — a hedge against an economy that no longer rewards rootlessness. After years of chasing freedom through motion, she’s finding a new version of it while mostly staying put.
