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Thai Immigration Arresting Foreigners for Illegally Working

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing illegal working in Thailand or working without authorization. This is something I was waiting for lack of better term "the other shoe to drop" on this issue. It was clear under the X-ray Outlaw Foreigner days and the "good guys in bad guys out" initiative, that last year in 2018, the priority seem to be placed on rounding up over stayers, finding people who were living illegally in Thailand and I have been waiting for the other shoe to drop to watch resources being allocated now on finding people who are working illegally in Thailand and it appears that in fact this is occurring. 

The following article is just one example. There have been multiple articles that I have seen throughout the internet in the past days on this but this one I think puts the finest point on it. This comes from the Nation, nationthailand.com. The article is titled: 3 Foreign Trainers at “Looktarn” Fitness Center to Face Charge over Work Permit. Quoting directly:  "Three foreign trainers at a fitness center were arrested for allegedly working without permission, Immigration Police Bureau Chief Police Lieutenant General Sompong Chingduang told a press conference."  Quoting further: "The 3 male suspects were identified as a 26 year old Frenchman, a 28 year old Hungarian and a 33 year old Italian.  Immigration Police earlier this week inspected the fitness center to check on the legal status of foreign employees there and found that although the three men had proper documents for temporary stay in Thailand, they were unable to present work permits. They were apprehended to face the charge of working without permission. I think you can probably presume if they didn't have work permits and they weren't in the system, they are probably going to be convicted of those charges. It is probably also safe to presume that those gentlemen are going to go ahead and be deported as well and as a result it seems likely they will also probably be blacklisted and the period of blacklisting will probably depend on the other circumstances involved in the case. 

I urge those who are watching this video to read that article. There is more detail in there. The reason I am bringing this up is I want to be clear. In the past Thai Immigration has been dealing with people who were out of Immigration status and it now appears to me as though a priority is being made for finding people who are out of work authorization status and that more resources may be allocated to ferreting out those individuals moving forward compared to the allocation of resources in the past which seemed to be prioritized for finding over stayers and people who entered illegally. It seems that most of those folks have been cleared out and now the priority is on people working illegally.

If you are working in the Kingdom of Thailand, you need to get into work authorization status as quickly as possible. If you are out of status, it can lead to substantially negative consequences as noted in this article and in this video generally. The other thing to keep in mind with respect to work authorization is, yes they are getting stricter about certain things but in the emergency decree of 2018, March specifically, once one has work authorization, their scope and scale of working in Thailand is much broader than it once was. So once you get your work permit, it really opens up a lot of avenues for being able to live and make a living here in Thailand whereas once it was much more confined to “province specific work” or it was much more confined to specific “job description activities”,   now it is much more liberalized once a Work Permit is actually issued. It is a good idea to go ahead and get into work permit status here in the Kingdom as soon as you can if you are looking to earn a living and live long term in Thailand.