Transcript of the above video: 

I wanted to make this sort of bumper to let folks know about Visa packages or Immigration packages here in Thailand. There have been a lot of changes to Immigration laws, rules, protocols and procedures roughly the last year or so. Well no the last five years in earnest but in the last year, we have seen even more acute changes if you will. For this reason, I want to make everybody aware we have a Border Run service here in our office; we assist people in setting up Border Runs. Now to be clear, that's not all we do and this is kind of more of a bespoke thing where we set up Border Runs for folks to assist them in maintaining lawful Immigration status here in the Kingdom. We also can assist with different types of visas, not just the newer ones which by the way just because a Visa is new, doesn't necessarily mean it's a great thing; there are ups and downs to all types of Visas. So the thing to take away from this, what I am trying to make a point is in this sort of bumper video is we are assisting with Border Runs; we do always assist with Thai Immigration. Anybody that is interested in those services, please feel free to contact us. Now on with this video. 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing inaccurate - I thought about calling it inappropriate but inaccurate and inappropriate seem to be kind of running hand in hand when it comes to sort of the subject matter of this video. As we have discussed in other videos recently, there has been a lot of discussion of new Immigration protocols but it's been coming from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And as we have discussed in other videos, Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not tasked with dealing with internal Immigration. The Immigration Bureau under the authority of the Interior Ministry has that mandate. 

That said, I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Thailand's new Visa regulations still have ambiguous elements. Yeah they always do. I mean that's how Immigration works. I love this stuff that these people are going on the internet and talking in absolutes about Immigration and also talking like they know something; I'm not talking about specifically officials on this one but a bunch of people just across YouTube talking with false authority, false confidence; truly it's larping to use the current phraseology or posing as I would call it. Pretending to know what you are talking about with regard to these topics. 

Look Immigration is a narrow and deep subset of law and regulation very similar to tax. It pertains to a very specific subset of law if you will or of sort of interactions but it's deep, it runs very deep and it can have profound implications for people to get the law wrong. So quoting directly, Pattaya Mail, pattayamail.com: "In a separate innovation, most tourists now receive 60 days on entry and can extend at local Immigration for a further month. Mr. Naruchai," and this is the person from Ministry of Foreign Affairs going around talking about these things. And again I understand Ministry of Foreign Affairs has a mandate to attract tourism to Thailand, to tout visas and things of that nature but at the end of the day they are not responsible for dealing with immigration internally. Quoting directly: "Mr. Naruchai said there is no specified number of repeat entries in a year and it is not mandatory to present a return or onward ticket or accommodation specifics, provided they can show (if asked) access to at least 20,000 baht or about US$560." Well again, this is this nonsensical bureaucratic double speak, "Oh it's not required unless they ask!" Well yeah. That's the answer. Immigration makes these decisions. The reason I have a problem with this is it creates a framework by which people who are looking to travel in Thailand believe that they can rely on that framework. Then when they get here and they have to deal with an Immigration officer, they get upset because that wasn't part of their paradigm; they didn't think that they had to deal with that framework. Well they do. It's not helping tourism to sort of gloss over the fact that you're going to have to deal with Immigration. Travel agents for people going to Disney World don't say "ahh, don't worry about US Customs and Border Protection". They don't speak to it because they don't have any authority to do so. Quoting further: "He cautioned that such evidence might be required if the Immigration Officer was "suspicious" for some reason. In other words, the detail is at the Immigration Officer's discretion." As it has always been. 

Again what has really been upsetting to me more than anything about all of this talk about visas and quite honestly a bunch of lay people who are completely talking out of their depth is exactly this. It creates a false impression as to how the Visa and Immigration process is going to work and that's going to have negative implications especially on the appearance of Thailand when the time comes that people are using these visas to travel into the Kingdom and to use them to remain here. Then you are going to see a lot of negative blow back on social media, in media generally, where people are talking about how bad and difficult Thai Immigration is to use

because they were painted a far too rosy picture as to how the system actually works, rather than actually being given the reality which is yeah Immigration has discretion; they are going to make determinations regarding entry and exit into Thailand regardless of what visa you are coming on, it doesn't matter. That's their job; they make those determinations. They make determinations per their own discretion regarding extension of status in the Kingdom as well. And bearing that in mind and keeping the objective reality within one's head is much better than going out and spreading a bunch of rosy kind of in my opinion, kind of non-realistic examples of how Immigration is going to work here in the Kingdom of Thailand.