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ResourcesVisa & Immigration LawThailand Immigration LawThe End of Visa Amnesty: Thai O-A Retirement Visas Examined

The End of Visa Amnesty: Thai O-A Retirement Visas Examined

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing O-A Visas. We are discussing specifically the Retirement Visa category and I don't want to get into to this too in-depth but Retirement Visas could either be issued in-country under an O Visa application or if issued abroad and extended in country subsequent to the issuance, they can be issued in O-A status as they are issued abroad by Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Not to get too deep into that, the differentiation between that kind of cosmetic difference but it can be a substantive difference. Suffice it to say we are talking about Retirement Visas just kind of generally especially where you had a Retirement Visa expire during this Amnesty period as there is some relevant information about the end of this Amnesty to be forthcoming in this video.  

A recent article from Thai Examiner, that is thaiexaminer.com, the article is titled Visa Amnesty to End with 30-day Extensions on Application as the Focus Moves to Long Stay Visa Holders. In this article, they are quoting directly from Deputy Commissioner Major General Porchjai Kantee and I urge folks to go ahead and check out this article directly on thaiexaminer.com, a lot information in here. Those folks over there really do provide very exhaustive, very insightful work regarding sort of this Immigration system as it is shaping up here in the home stretch if you will of the Amnesty. Quoting directly from the Deputy Commissioner we mentioned before, a Deputy Commissioner of the Immigration Bureau, so this is valid, important, on point information. "All long-term Visa holders whose permits to stay expired after March 26th, also must submit an application for an extension to stay from now until September 26, 2020. He urged such foreigners to hasten their applications to regularize their visas status."   

So it is very clear that those who entered in Non-immigrant status are kind of being treated a bit differently from those who entered Thailand in Tourist Visa status. We have made a number of videos on this channel recently about how those who in Tourist Visa status may and I stress "may", it is not a foregone conclusion, there are a lot of conditions precedent which need to be met in order to trigger the mechanisms necessary for extensions to be issued, but they may possibly get extensions to maintain status after the end of the Amnesty. What is becoming increasingly clear from the information contained or quoted that I just cited is Long Stay Visas, so called, but Non-immigrant visas, appear to be being treated or going to be being treated qualitatively differently than the other type of visas specifically Tourist Visas. Again, we have done videos on Business Visas and the other O Visa categories but the thing to take away from this video is "yeah it looks like retirees, if you came in for example on an O-A multi-entry and you were stamped in for your year and your year came up during the Amnesty, you really need to seriously look into normalizing, regularizing your status before the 26th”. You should really think about doing this sooner rather than later because the closer we get to the deadline, it is going to get a little bit more hectic, it is going to become a little bit more frantic, it is like a bottleneck. They are going to be more and more people looking to regularize their status and possibly it may be as a practical or logistical matter, very difficult to get that done. So it may not be a bad idea to contact a legal professional, gain some insight and guidance into how best to go about doing this, but I really can't stress this enough if you are in non-immigrant status, long stay category visas that expired during this Amnesty, you need to look at regularizing your status as soon as possible.