Transcript of the above video:

Now I don’t really want this video to alarm anyone particularly so let me just preface this by saying, while I think that this is noteworthy, I do not think that there's any kind of emergency; do not flip out by this video. I put "alert" on there again not really to scare anyone, but I do think this is noteworthy. I've kind of waited to get into the analysis on this. I could have done these, well this was all kind of percolating up in the Press last week, I decided to go ahead and kind of take a minute to kind of digest it. I'm glad I did that because I am able to make this video now and provide some insight and my opinion to folks who are watching. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: 100 cops to be charged over illegal visas. There is a lot going on in here. I am going to actually be using this article as a touchstone for a number of videos that will be coming out throughout this week probably, for those who are watching right now because there is a lot going on here. There's sort of a lot to take in with this.

I think we may be seeing something of a major sea change within Thai Immigration, something that we haven't seen for a number of years now. So again, now does this mean this is a massive thing that we need to all flip out about at this moment? No, not at all. It's just something to think about because things are changing. Quoting directly: "More than 100 Immigration Officers are suspected of involvement in the illegal issuing of visas for Chinese investors in so-called grey businesses, Immigration Bureau Commissioner Pol Lt Gen Pakphumpipat Sajjapan said yesterday. Pol Lt Gen Pakphumpipat said they would be charged with malfeasance and demanding and taking benefits in return for illegal services." This is the key though. "More than 100 Immigration Officers". That will have tremendous impact on the overall system I have to imagine. Now again, to some extent this is a level of speculation so when I first read the article I pumped the brakes, I didn't really want to make a video on it at that moment because I said "well at first glance this is huge". It is still big, it is a big deal but again I don't sort of want to for lack of a better term, oversell it. Is the sky falling? No Chicken Little, it is not falling, but this is major news. This represents a real fundamental paradigm shift again along the lines of what we have talked about for years which is Immigration used to sort of consider itself seemingly an administrative function. More and more, Immigration here in Thailand and other places around the world including the United States, tends to view itself more as a law enforcement sort of apparatus and therefore they have very different paradigms about that.

I think Thai Immigration matters, yeah it is not going to change overnight but I think this might be a harbinger of things to come with respect to the possibility that Immigration protocols may tighten up. We also might, and I think likely will see, enhanced scrutiny of future Thai Immigration cases. The other thing to keep in mind is a lot of people I have talked to in the interim since I first read this article and I have kind of talked to friends and things, they said "well they are targeting the Chinese". That is not how it works, that's not how it works. As we have discussed in videos pertaining to US Immigration going back into the Trump Administration when the so called Muslim ban was instituted, I said at the time this will have ramifications throughout the US Immigration System and lo and behold it did. As we talked about at the time, it required all Consulates to conduct similar reviews to those in the Muslim ban area and it is my understanding to this day those protocols still persist. As they say in the movie, Company Business, "Government's come and go; bureaucracies remain the same". There's something of that going on here when you are talking about major shifts within bureaucracies because the ramifications tend to kind of hold on, it tends to be "sticky" if you will with respect to the changes that occur with respect to these paradigm shifts.

So again don't freak out but I think we are probably going further into 2023, we are probably going to be looking at an Immigration System that is quite a bit more strict than what we have been dealing with at least during the COVID period.