Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the switching of passports, so going from one passport to another for Dual Nationals kind of in transit. This is something I think is very misunderstood, not only just by sort of lay folks out there that just when they kind of, most people don't sit around thinking about nationality and Immigration Law all the time. If they did they would probably tear their hair out; I am surprised I haven't done that yet. But basically like lay people will think oh you have got two passports, you can just pick and choose while you are travelling which one you want to use. Then meanwhile there are folks sort of in the "Digital Nomad space", whatever you want to call it; the "perpetual traveller", people that are constantly well maybe constantly, kind of moving about and who like to live kind of a nomadic lifestyle in this kind of globalized era that we have come to find ourselves in and a lot of those folks often either have in their own right, dual nationality or opt to take dual nationality depending on their circumstances. They may get into a Citizenship by Investment Program, they may have dual nationality by dint of birth either in a certain place or to a certain parent or they have a certain background which entitles them to take nationality in a given country and they have dual nationality. It should not be presumed that third countries are going to sort of let you transition from one passport to the other in transit.

What I am talking about here is you get on a plane and let's say you leave Thailand on your American passport and in transit you want to move from that to your Italian passport and be admitted into Laos on your Italian passport. Oftentimes I have found that Immigration is pretty reluctant to do that. Well they're going to see the passenger manifest, for example in Thailand they have got the APP System, the Advance Passenger Processing System which allows them to see who is coming in. They are generally going to want to admit you on the passport that you came in on, on the passenger manifest. Now again, there are different countries have different policies. I am not saying this is the end all, be all. There are different regions around the world; that has been my experience when seeing dual Nationals try to do this in the Southeast Asia region, they kind of get shut down when they try to do it. For example, I have seen two people I can think of in the past few of years try to switch from one of their nationalities to the other and go into Laos. Obviously this is before the pandemic and we had to deal with all the shutdown and everything, but yeah I saw that a couple of times. Probably in the last five years I have seen that at least twice going to Laos. Laos just “nope, not allowing it!” So again, different countries are going to have different policies. You can always be admitted to the country of nationality on the passport of that nationality, that's generally never an issue but it is getting into that other country, trying to move these passports around, that becomes a bit of a tricky thing.