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ResourcesVisa & Immigration LawNationality LawThai Visa Issues: Does a New Passport Mean a Clean Slate?

Thai Visa Issues: Does a New Passport Mean a Clean Slate?

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thai visas and new passports. 

This has been a topic that people have sort of, I have just noticed it over the years, and sometimes people think they are getting away with something by getting a new passport. Now under certain circumstances, I think it is both reasonable and prudent to go ahead and get a new passport, under certain circumstances, where you are entering the Kingdom. What circumstances are those? Well folks that have had a lot of entries and exits into the Kingdom but are genuinely coming to the Kingdom for temporary stays, sometimes it just gets to a point where your passport is just so full of stamps that it is hard to find a place to stamp a new Visa stamp.  You don't have any pages left. Immigration Officers have to process a lot of people in a given day and anything that you can do to reduce consternation on the part of those folks and basically just make the overall process more smooth, is always a good idea. So sometimes getting a new passport is just prudent. You have got page after page after page of stamp after stamp after stamp; there is hardly any room left. That is a reasonable time to do it. 

What I do find interesting is people will find themselves either being blacklisted and attempting to get a new passport in order to re-enter the Kingdom. That has become virtually a thing of the past because the biometric systems that have been rolled out or are being rolled out right now, which I will go into more detail in a minute, but those biometric protocols those have been undertaken by those being blacklisted and deported, those folks are already in the biometric system, so as time rolls on those folks going to have a really hard time getting back in the Kingdom.

A new passport in and of itself does not guarantee re-entry. A clean passport is not going to just like magically usher an individual in. They have various systems in place to track people who are coming into the Kingdom. Where I see this most prevalent with folks that use a new passport in order to clean up, is where they have been trying to live in Thailand in tourist visa status and Immigration Officials are simply just getting wise to that stuff and the paradigm has changed. They do not want people living in Thailand in Tourist Visa status and for this reason those who may be red flagged in the system, even with a new passport I think it is very reasonable to presume that you know you may still not be granted entry simply because you are already in the system regardless of the passport and again facial recognition technology, biometric data gathering is all being rolled out at various Immigration checkpoints throughout Thailand.  So I think within a year of the making of this video we are probably going to see a situation where regardless of one's passport, it is probably going to come down to biometrics and where it is biometrics that are going to be necessary in order to enter. The “cleaness” of the passport is irrelevant. People's immigration history will be tagged to their biometric data so the minute your fingerprint is put in the system or your retina is scanned they can see how much you have been in or out or what status you have been maintaining in the Kingdom and they will make their decisions on that according to the actual facts of your situation not so much what they can see in front of them in terms of a "clean" passport.