Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing "20 Farang arrested for Thai Work Permit violations?" Let's get into this. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article in the Pattaya Mail, pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Surge in prosecutions for Asian Foreign workers in Thailand. Note that they say Asian in the title; we will get to this, hold on just a second. Quoting directly: "Although the Immigration Bureau is perceived as the main agency for catching foreigners snatching Thai jobs, the Department of Employment (DoE) has its own teams of investigators. Their October 2022 - March 2023 report says 685 employment venues were prosecuted and a total of 1,550 people prosecuted. The number of Europeans, Americans and Australians arrested during this period by DoE Officers was very small and around 20 individuals." I am coming back to that, quoting further: "This may have been because the inspection appears to have been principally aimed at illegal working and selling goods, hairdressing, driving vehicles and massage. These are activities popular with Asian economic migrants. However, the report does not include arrest by Immigration Police during the six months period. Immigration command does not routinely produce statistics on its arrests.

So first thing to note, two things going on here. These are arrests from Department of Employment exclusively. And that should be noted because most of the time Department of Employment in the past was not actively out there looking for this. This is a major sea change; Department of Employment is inspecting, they are scrutinizing, they are looking for work authorization violations. Be aware of that because they are they are looking in addition to Thai Immigration. Thai immigration also has the authority to cite people for work authorization violations and even detain and possibly deport those folks if they are determined to be in violation of relevant Thai Law. I happen to know of an instance where someone was cited and eventually deported by Thai Immigration, unfortunately they contacted us beyond the point of no return, there really wasn't any way to rectify the situation, they were already in proceedings and the determination had already been made. But yeah, that was an immigration matter and Immigration does not put out their data to the same level of transparency as the Department of Employment. Meanwhile, within that piece and I really do urge people who are watching this video, go check out the Pattaya Mail. Pattaya Mail is a great source of information as I are all the sources that we cite on this channel. Bangkok Post for example, I have cited recently Khao Sod English, the Thai Examiner, the Phuket News, all great sources of information as are other, anything I am citing is something is a publication, I am constantly keeping track of the feeds coming off of various news organizations here in Thailand, to try to keep people up to date on the information pertinent to this channel. So if we are citing a given source because it is quite honestly a pretty good source of information, Pattaya Mail being among those. But I urge those who are watching this video to go check out pattayamail.com, read that article further in detail because there is a lot of good information contained therein that I am not even talking about.

20 people between October 2022 and March 2023, so that's the end of the Emergency Decree where essentially there was a lot of laxity regarding people in country regarding Immigration status, 20 people being arrested who are Farang, what we would call Farang, Western foreigners, and I understand there are some people out there that think the word Farang is a pejorative term. I don't take that position it's just sort of the sort of the catch-all that Thais use to describe essentially Caucasian foreigners or foreigners from the West or the collective West. In any event, I don't think that is a small number at all quite honestly, and it is only from Department of Employment, they are not even taking into consideration the things that Immigration has been doing and they are not real apt to publish their data. The reason I bring this up is I think moving forward we are going to see more scrutiny and more enforcement of Thai Law pertaining to employment authorization. You have got to remember, Thailand is coming off of a very hard economic moment. There were essentially 3 years where the economy, especially the tourism sector, was just knocked to its knees, it was just cut off at the knees. It is recovering but there is going to be an impetus on the part of Thai policy makers as well as Thai Law enforcement especially law enforcement within the Immigration and Employment apparatuses which is going to be keen to scrutinize and possibly arrest those who are viewed as interfering with the Thai Employment ecosystem for lack of a better term, so the whole 'stealing a Thai job' worry and that kind of thing. What can you take away from this video? Well the thing to take away from this video is be very assiduous if you are coming to Thailand to work, get into proper Visa status and also maintain proper employment status during your tenure of work and presence here in the Kingdom of Thailand.