Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Immigration in kind of a broad, general context. I thought I would go ahead and make a video so people understood why I was making this video, I thought I would do a preface so people understood why.

This is coming in the aftermath of the recent "U-turn" on the issue of Vaccine Mandate for travellers coming into Thailand; I am making this video on the heels of that. This article was written before this U-turn occurred but there is an excerpt here that I think is very interesting, I want to get into it. So it is from an article in the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: New rules spook tourists. Quoting directly: "If the Government really wants to protect the public, it should only impose the requirement on tourists from nations which have yet to fully lift their Covid-19 restrictions, they said." So "they" being tourism operators here in Thailand who were quite upset when this thing was announced. Again, it has been rescinded; there is no vaccination mandate coming to Thailand now. They were talking about it, it was never imposed, now it has been rescinded so it never happened, let's put it that way.

The reason for this, when I first made my video I was pretty critical of the so-called Vaccine Mandate, whatever you want to call it, Vaccine Passport, I was pretty darned critical of it but I didn't think of one aspect of this which at the time they said: "oh we have got to do this to everybody because we can't be discriminatory if we only impose this on the Chinese.” I kind of overlooked this, a friend of mine brought this up which is Immigration discriminates against nationalities daily, that is what they do. I mean there are policies in place, for example an American passport holder who enters Thailand, enters visa free. They enter Visa exempt, they just come in on their passport. Somebody from Bangladesh can't do that or Tanzania or Uganda and there are places here in Southeast Asia that aren't allowed to come into Thailand and just get 30 days on arrival with nothing. I mean there are multiple jurisdictions that Immigration routinely discriminates against. I don't see why it would have been a problem at least conceptually to say "yeah these nationals have to deal with these entry requirements".

Now I disagree with the whole thing on principle so I am not saying that that is what I would have wanted. But it was interesting to me that it was stated that this had to be applied across the board because we didn't want to discriminate which meanwhile, that is what Thai Immigration does every minute of every day. They are discriminating against letting people into the country, they are discriminating in the sense that they are looking at different nationalities, treating them differently because there are different rules and laws pertaining to different nationalities under Thai Immigration Law. So the notion that Thai Immigration or for that matter any Immigration service, in the United States there are specific types of visas based on nationality, there are preference categories, there are, what do they call that, the visa numbers which are handed out by NVC and nationality can play into that so again, yeah discrimination occurs frequently within the Immigration Systems not only of Thailand but of the various countries of the world.