Transcript of the above video: 

This video the thumbnail is one of these “foreigners behaving badly” thumbnails, and it's based on, I am citing an article where we get into kind of the standard narrative of foreigners getting rounded up for working illegally in Thailand. But this video is kind of special because I wanted to drill down onto one precise sort of sub-point here. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Immigration raids net 17 foreigners on Thai tourist islands. Quoting directly: "On Koh Phangan, 12 foreigners - five Russians, two Ukrainians, five Myanmar nationals - were arrested on Thursday on charges that included setting up a private school without permission, running a nursery without permission, working illegally and hiring illegal migrants." 

I want to go back to this 'running a nursery without permission' and it goes to the title of the video regarding children. Yeah look folks, one, I have seen this a lot. I don't know why the Russians seem to feel compelled, specifically I have seen multiple articles about Russians going to like these island resorts and then they try to set up like daycares and then they come in and get shut down by the police for various things including work authorization. And people, one, look, I have observed the Russians as kind of an outside observer; they kind of keep to themselves in sort of an expat group for obvious reasons. They have their own linguistic group and things of that nature; they just do their own thing. And I don't know, maybe it is a communal thing, they do tend to charter flights down here from their villages so up especially like in the colder parts of Russia, I should say the Siberian parts of Russia - I don't know if there are varying degrees of cold in Russia, or it's all cold but it's just on a spectrum - although I have been to Moscow and St. Petersburg and they are beautiful in the spring, I will say that.  

But the point I am trying to make with respect to this is, what is the underlying issue here because it's not really so much concentrating on work authorization, which is its own problem. As you see this got swept up in a broader net, but more to the point, Thai Law Enforcement takes it really seriously when there's like an opaque nexus point where children are involved. There's like a nexus point where people are coming and going and dropping off kids and people are taking care of them and da, da, da, da, and there's basically no documentation associated with it. Nobody knows who's who from the outside. The Thais don't know who's who, the Thais don't know whose kids, blah, blah, blah, blah. Allowing that to persist without any kind of Government oversight could lead to, at very least, a situation where you have an opaque nexus for no other reason - and I'm not casting aspersions here, I'm just stating it hypothetically - it's not hard to infer how it could easily be a situation where that could become a nexus point for trafficking of children, and that is a major concern for Thai Law Enforcement and it's why you are seeing them concentrate on this. Now again, I'm not casting aspersions at the Russians, I have just seen multiple stories over the past call it two years, of this same thing. It seems like they try to set up these unlicensed daycares. Again what I expect it is it probably starts off as two or three families are like traveling together and they all agree okay so and so is going to watch the kids this day and then maybe it gets known sort of through word of mouth among other people that are travelling, "hey these people may be able to take care of your kid while you go and do blah, blah, blah and that sort of snowballs. The next thing you know, you have a thriving business effectively. The problem is it's not licensed; the problem is you don't have work authorization, and the big problem is as a policy matter, again Thai Law Enforcement does not like to see these opaque nexuses wherein they think that possibly - and again not saying that it is - but possibly child trafficking could occur.