Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, I am asking the question primarily, do the problems we're seeing with the Elite System herald issues to come for the DTV. I know I have gotten burned a lot over the DTV, but I stand by what I've said over time about the DTV, both on a personal opinion perspective, as well as a policy perspective as well as a practitioner and somebody at least with a working knowledge of Immigration Law, I stand by it. It was poorly conceived. It was designed for political purposes, purposes that I don't think were necessarily in the best interest of Thailand as a whole, and the outcomes have been less than optimal from multiple different perspectives, not least of which the foreigners who have detrimentally relied on these visas, be it the Elite, or what I expect in the future more and more will be the DTV as well. 

So I thought of making this video after somebody forwarded to me an email that came from Thailand Privilege, that is thailandprivilege.co.th.  That is the sort of private company that deals with the membership side of Elite, and then there's a Visa component, but at the end of the day, all Visa matters are ultimately at the discretion of immigration. So some of the things that some of these operators will say about something gloss over the reality of how things may actually work in terms of immigration matters. That said, further I've seen a lot of emails recently on the Elite Visa and complaints from people who got into that system years back and now regret it, because the services in their mind have deteriorated, and that brings me to this email I received and I am going to leave the person who sent it anonymous but the forwarded email is actually from Thailand Privilege Card Company, and it was titled: Announcement on Advance Notice Requirement for Thailand Privilege Visa, Elite Visa Renewal at Immigration Division 2, Immigration Suvarnabhumi Airport. And this person wrote an email, and I actually think that they concisely summarize the situation. Quote: "Hello, this latest deterioration of service for Elite Visa holders may be of interest. Basically if you get a new passport, you have to wait 2 months before you can re-enter Thailand and get your Elite Visa in your new passport. So for UK folks it would be 3 months assuming you get your new passport within a month. When you get to Thailand you will be questioned about money and why you have stayed so long despite the Elite being sold as a non-hassle alternative to a Retirement Visa. I wish I had listened to Ben and never paid for Elite. There's no way Elite will last another 5 years. Who would pay a substantial amount of money to be treated like this." Now those last couple of sentences are sort of speculative, and tip of the hat to you sir. I appreciate you noting that, yeah in the past I told people. I've always felt like for, especially for retirees, the standard O Retirement Visa is probably the best thing. There are circumstances where you can get more optimal benefits or something else, but I like the standard O because we know what it looks like, and it has been around since pretty much as far as anybody in expat land, in modern expat land is concerned, it has basically been around forever. And the couple of times it was changed fundamentally in the '90s, they grandfathered in the people who came in under the prior terms. So that's why I have always liked the standard O Retirement Visa; that's just FYI for that. 

But the point of this video, and he says something right here. "When you get to Thailand you will be questioned about money, and why you have stayed so long." That pertains to another video we did; it's been the last 90 days but probably the last 2 months where I was talking about, and this was again quoting people, and this was actually stuff from Thailand Privilege, from the folks that deal with Elite directly, that now they are scrutinizing your “tourism intent” because Elite Visas are not inherently work authorized. I will get to that analogy in a moment with regard to the DTV, which that more than anything to my mind is the harbinger of what might be to come with regard to scrutiny on DTV holders, especially those doing multiple Border Runs in order to effectively live here over the course of five years, I have to bet that things are going to change with regard to that. 

That being said, and the point I'm trying to make is Elite was and is or more specifically I should say Immigration is scrutinizing Elite Visa holders' banking activity and things of this nature to ascertain whether or not they are working here and it's pretty stringent scrutiny, let's put it that way. It's pretty deep. They're really looking hard at people, and apparently there's been a number of cases involving some high-net-worth individuals that might have been International, operating illicitly, some of them were what could be described as criminals and things. Again I don't like painting a broad brush when I don't have specific citations but basically, the sort of implicit idea, or implicit accusation if you will was that people were using Elite to come to Thailand and work illegally and operate nominee businesses and things. There may be something to that but it's now having an effect on all Elite Visa holders, and these are people that paid to be in this system, and paid significant amounts of money to be in the system and they are seeing heightened scrutiny from Immigration - especially is it pertains to work authorization or to any idea that you could be working in Thailand - which brings me to the Destination Thailand Visa and the inherent problem and all the vagueness under which it was created, especially as regards work authorization. Because it says "oh, you can be a remote worker." Okay, whatever that means, except for the fact that it is not defined in any of the Labour Acts of the Immigration Act of '79. It's just this vague notion which people can say, "oh you're being nitpickity!" I am because the police will be. If you ever get jammed up on one of these visas, do you honestly think that the interpretation is going to go toward you not operating correctly? There may be circumstances. No, I don't think anybody's looking to kick down people's doors for being on a laptop, talking to somebody back in Iowa, about whatever your troubleshooting job is; no I don't think that. But what I am saying is look, there's heightened scrutiny now on Elite Visa holders who paid just to have the Visa. The DTV requires substantially less financial commitment, orders of magnitude less financial commitment, and it's also not work authorized for Thailand. You can't even get a Bank Account using that kind of Visa, and it basically leaves that person just sort of standing in a weird kind of limbo that was opaquely created primarily by Ministry of Foreign Affairs who does not deal with internal immigration matters. That is not their bailiwick; they deal with external immigration matters but fine, they created these visas. If you go back and you know the history, they didn't get consensus with internal immigration and then they left this Visa so vague regarding things like work authorization; you can't get a Bank Account on it because you can't be able to accrue funds in Thailand. But that said, then you have also gone this other 180-day threshold which pertains to being a tax resident. I have discussed that in length in prior videos especially the notion they were trying to create these man traps to catch everybody and assess them for taxes before they could get out of the country, and then basically hit them for the money at that moment; that was what was being rolled out. Then Interior Minister Anutin kept it from happening by rolling out the Digital, what was that called, it was the Thailand Digital Arrival Card (TDAC). He pulled that out because it sort of affirmatively forestalled rolling out this other thing, that what I can only describe as the WEF influenced, heavily WEF influenced faction of the coalition government that was in power this time roughly last year, he was pushing back against that; that happened earlier though. 

Long story short and what I am saying here is to my mind, if they're doing this on the Elite Visas for people that have previously paid to be in the program and who haven't materially changed their situation insofar as okay yeah, if a guy on an Elite Visa gets arrested for some crime in Thailand, sure, that's cause for scrutiny. But just people who are just being here under the terms of the Visa as they thought it should be and they are being sort of taken to task and sort of nitpicked over every aspect of what they're doing here, I have to imagine that's coming to the DTV, and I have to imagine that is coming to the DTV in a big way, because it's work authorization is so vague. 

On top of that, they.are talking about yeah now if you get a new passport, they have got to put you through another background check for another 2 months, so it means they won't attach your actual Visa which means you are sitting around in this limbo when you thought you could just hop out of the country, hop right back in and just get on with your life. Again similar, I may be forecasting here a little bit, but I don't think it's apropos of nothing. The DTV was billed as this, "oh it's five years", but it's multi-entry. Its model basically is a long, what we used to call multi-entry Non-immigrant Visa. You could get a B Visa or an O Visa for Thailand; the sticker was valid for a year. Every time you got stamped in, you got 90 days. This thing is like an expanded version of that. It's 5 years and you get 6 months every time you get stamped in. But here's the rub. When they came up with this the first time, it was in the context of wanting to do an ASEAN-wide visa, a PAN ASEAN Visa and they were saying, "oh we'll have people and they can like run around the region and we will all benefit and things." To my mind, now when we look in retrospect, especially the parties that were behind that Government and their relationship to other nations in the region, Cambodia, we start to see maybe why those policies were set up that way. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of not being able to get that Pan ASEAN Visa, we see this DTV which is billed as, "oh, you can use it as a nomad" - again the presumption being you're not living here. And this is where the rubber is going to hit the road on this DTV. One, it was said, stated at the outset that you only got one in-country extension. Now that has kind of been like hazed up if you will or sort of fudged around where, "yeah, we don't exactly know what that means", except we do. They said it. It's one extension. And I know people don't want to believe that that's what it is, but that is what they said at the time. I've also put people through the extension process and the Immigration Officers literally said to them, you only get one of these; that was what was told to them at the time. So now we're putting people into a Border Run scenario. Well again, if there's heightened scrutiny on these Elite Visa folks using Border Run, now you've got people that are living here that aren't supposed to be living here. I can see a situation coming up in a certain point where they start saying, "hey, you've used two years of this thing: 6 months, 6 months, 6 months, 6 months; that looks to us like a 'carousel tourist visa'. That's what they call it in the US, multi-entry Tourist Visas. You can come into the United States over 10, years and every time you enter you get six months but if you more than like once leave for like a day and come back in, they'll just cancel the whole thing because they will say it's a Carousel Visa, you're using it to live here, that's not the function of this Visa. I can completely see that paradigm being applied in the future with regard to the DTV and what scares me is it was all done as if that was impossible to happen. They created this thing to create a spike in tourism numbers at a time that they felt it was politically expedient to have that, and then the aftermath is all these people who detrimentally relied on this Visa, are going to find that the terms are constantly changing. In fact we might even do the thumbnail, "I'm changing the deal, pray I don't change it again." Darth Vader in Empire Strikes Back. Probably put that up as a thumbnail for this. That's what I worry about with regard to this DTV.

Now folks can burn me and say that I'm being intentionally cynical, I'm not. I've warned folks about the problems with the thing since the outset; it's actually been detrimental to my bottom line to do that. But I feel like the only thing I can do is tell the truth on this channel, and I'll continue to do so as the situation evolves.