While US President Donald Trump has given Afrikaners refugee status in the United States on the false premise that they are victims of human rights abuses at the hands of the South African state, Americans live comfortably in Cape Town as “digital nomads.”

The term digital nomad refers to people who work remotely while traveling and living abroad. Like the swallow, the digital nomad migrates to the southern hemisphere, to places like Cape Town, in search of summer. Digital nomads are modern, cosmopolitan individuals familiar with global travel and easily move between London, New York, Mexico City, and Berlin—thanks to their Euro-American passports. This phenomenon is yet another expression of the logic of global capitalism. The signifier “digital nomad” is merely an ideological expression designating an economic migrant distinguished by their level of social capital and class position.

Let’s imagine the typical existence of an American digital nomad in Cape Town. During the average day, they would take their phone and Zoom calls over coffee at the local roastery or a Bistro on the Atlantic Seaboard. After Pilates class, they grab a matcha and stroll on the Sea Point promenade, where they record and upload a TikTok video about how incredibly cheap Cape Town is: “Only $3 for a matcha, Cape Town is so cheap!” In the evening, they would explore what the city’s nightlife has to offer. At $1 to R19, the buying power of digital nomads who possess dollars and pounds significantly outweighs that of the average South African.

Cape Town is widely regarded as a leading destination for both tourists and digital nomads. The Central Business District (CBD), encompassing the city’s downtown core and adjacent areas, along with the Atlantic Seaboard—an affluent coastal region—features a diverse array of cafés, restaurants, farmers markets, and natural landscapes, offering a quality of life and aesthetic appeal that is seldom paralleled globally. At the start of 2025, TimeOut declared Cape Town the “best city in the world.” The article describes the allure of Cape Town I am accustomed to hearing when I visit home:

Where else in the world can you hang out with a colony of African penguins, taste some of the world’s finest wines, stroll along Blue Flag beaches, enjoy stunning views from atop one of the New 7 Wonders of Nature, and sample some of the most eclectic nightlife and vibes in the world… all in one day?

It is difficult to disagree with the description; however, what TimeOut does not tell its readers is the appalling conditions that the majority of the city’s people live in. Apartheid’s social engineering and urban planning in Cape Town continue to be a daily reality for the majority of its inhabitants, along with social ills that stem from decades of neglect by city, provincial, and national authorities. Recent statistics by the South African Police Services (SAPS) show that the Western Cape recorded the highest number of gang-related murders, with 270 people being killed from October to December 2024.

The economically rightwing party that governs Cape Town, the Democratic Alliance (DA), is uninterested in undoing Cape Town’s racial and class inequalities. Despite the recent social housing project completed in Pinelands, bordering Thornton, the multi-racial neighbouring suburb, there has not been the development of social housing in the inner city or on the Atlantic Seaboard. In fact, in 2016, after nearly 4,000 submissions of public support for the development of social housing, the City of Cape Town sold the Tafelberg Property (formerly the Tafelberg Remedial School) located in the upmarket coastal suburb of Sea Point to a private developer. The sale of the site was what led to the emergence of the social movement, Reclaim the City. After a court challenge in 2020, the Western Cape High Court set aside the sale of the property, citing that the provincial government and City of Cape Town did not meet their constitutional and legislative obligations to address spatial Apartheid in Cape Town. In January 2025, the City of Cape Town announced “plans” to develop a portion of the site into affordable and mixed-use housing. However, this is a minor concession in the grand scheme of things and does very little to materially transform the city.

Latest figures show that Cape Town has 25,816 Airbnb listings. This is more than any other global city. The ease with which properties can be rented means that many digital nomads use Airbnb to secure accommodation in the city. However, this knock-on effect is that many ordinary Capetonians can no longer afford to live in the inner city, exacerbating the already fraught housing crisis. In response to this and other multiple crises, the University of Cape Town collective Dismantling the Ivory Tower has likened digital nomads to modern colonizers in recent outrage on Instagram.

If anything, the digital nomad phenomenon and Cape Town’s housing crisis tell us something about capitalism. It demonstrates that capital is infinitely creative in finding new ways of remaking itself and generating value in the process. The housing crisis in Cape Town represents a larger trend in the development of capitalism in South Africa and elsewhere. If historical conquest and settler-colonialism account for capitalism’s original sin, then the aggressive intrusion of capital into Cape Town’s housing market signifies a continuation by other means. To be clear, the development of capitalism has not ended; it continues, mutates, and displaces whatever is in its path. Capitalism does not respect heritage and history, not least if they fall outside its logic and interests.

In “selling” Cape Town, which turns on discourses of “tourism” and “foreign direct investment,” new avenues for commodification are identified and exploited. Since capital cannot produce value by itself, it appropriates value through processes that are nothing short of violent. Such is the case in Cape Town today. South Africa’s coalition government, also known as the Government of National Unity—including the ANC, nominally committed to undoing South Africa’s racial legacies and a phalanx of rightwing parties, including the DA, working hard to stall that—encourages digital nomads to make South Africa their temporary home.

The Department of Home Affairs, the government department responsible for managing migration in South Africa, has introduced a new work visa called the “Nomad Visa,” designed to attract skilled foreign workers with an annual income of higher than R650,796 (about $34,000; which lands you roughly in the top 10% of all earners in South Africa). Including a short-term tax exemption, the Nomad Visa allows remote workers to live in and work in South Africa for up to three years.

Digital nomads lose little sleep over who they displace in the process of consumption and extraction. “Nomad Week,” a conference that aims to sell the idea of Cape Town to potential digital nomads, took place on March 9, 2025. At a measly $170 (just under 4,000 Rands) for a ticket, you can “Join 300+ digital nomads from around the world for a week of inspiration, connection, and impact in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa.” Nomad Week boasted “visionary keynote speakers,” “unconference sessions,” “outdoor adventures,” “vibrant social events,” and a “Social Impact Day.” On their website, under the heading “Social Impact Day—Let’s Give Back!” we learn that the founder of Nomad Week is a white South African and that the people of South Africa are “near & dear to her.” A glance at their social media shows a mostly white world.

As a gesture of goodwill, I suppose, one of the “activities” includes donating food parcels to poor black children and donating some of their labor to painting an “underprivileged school,” which in South Africa, means black. Accompanying the description of the “Social Impact Day” is a stock photograph of a group of miscellaneous smiling African children. A classic NGO trope, the undifferentiated African child appeals to the perverse conscience of the digital nomad so that they can proudly claim that they did their part in “giving back.”

The digital nomad phenomenon is but the latest stage in the development of the logic of capitalism in South Africa, and it is linked to international migration. For many of these digital nomads, the desire to leave global cities is driven by an economic reality that they can no longer afford to live a good life in those cities. There is, therefore, not much difference between the Zimbabwean service worker who migrates to South Africa to work low-wage jobs and the New Yorker who lives on the Atlantic Seaboard—except the state views the latter as “more economically valuable” than the former. And that the New Yorker is usually white. The basis on which both migrate is economic.

It is time to rethink how we view and talk about migrants and tourists. When does a tourist stop being a tourist? When do they become a migrant? The term digital nomad is misleading; their extractive economic engagement is secured by class, race, and social capital. It is also perhaps too early to compare the digital nomad to a modern coloniser. The digital nomad is purely a consumer class, while adding nothing of value to the economy or the country they inhabit (their whole schtick is working for some international company from the comfort of another country). Their consumption is contingent on their ability to be in the country, and as such, it is not sustainable in the long term.

Although not all digital nomads are alike—that is to say, the freelancer from São Paulo might be in a different economic position relative to someone from Europe or the US—they both constitute examples of the logic of how multiple crises play a role in migration. The digital nomad is an economic migrant who has been spat out of the circuit of global capitalism in search of a better, more affordable life where capital is less concentrated. As an economic migrant, it is more profitable for the digital nomad to live in a Global South city with a comparatively low standard of living while earning a salary (in dollars, pounds, or euros) that allows for a life of leisure.

Herein lies the rub: while the traditional economic migrant adds value to the local economy (in the form of selling labor power), the digital nomad merely lives and consumes. And in South Africa, migrant workers from other African countries are often subjected to xenophobic violence. There is nothing “nomadic” about the digital nomad, except that their frequent movements from one city to another are occasioned by the necessity to flout visa and tax regulations. At the end of the day, the digital nomad wants to live a good life, but at what cost? When the government creates special visa categories for people who do not contribute productively to the economy, we should be concerned.