Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing why the Electronic Travel Authorization in Thailand should be seriously reconsidered especially in light of all the issues associated with the United States' ESTA program; that's the Electronic System for Travel Authorization in the United States which I think acted as something of a model for Thailand to create this newly proposed ETA System, this Electronic Travel Authorization System which to my mind looks an awful lot like Thailand Pass which is what was brought in during the great scare, the great exaggeration that was the so-called COVID pandemic.

We first saw this in the iteration of the Certificate of Entry to be able to get into Thailand, which was a very cumbersome process; it was very difficult to get. We got one of the first ones issued in a non-diplomatic sense and I remember people at the time sending me emails saying thanks for making the video actually showing what a Certificate of Entry looks like because we didn't even know what it was. Meanwhile they then created sort of a digital version of this which became known as Thailand Pass which is what basically was the prevailing modus operandi if you were for like the final year and a half of all the lockdowns and my opinion ongoing hysteria that surrounded the WHO's worldwide attempt to, I don't know, lock us all down, tell us all what to do for really no good reason. But leaving that aside, going back to the actual Immigration implication, yeah the Thailand Pass was rolled out and it basically created a ring fence if you will around Thailand wherein you had to do all these preliminary things digitally in order to gain access to Thailand. They are talking about bringing this back; again it's now being called the Electronic Travel Authorization, I think and again sort of reference to or analogous to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization.

And let me just say, Thailand really reconsider this. I see no real upside to any of this in a practical sense. We already have the Immigration apparatus that we need to go ahead and deal with any problems. Again there's the APPS system, Advanced Passenger Processing System, PIBICS System which are already in place, they're working well. Again if we want tourism, putting in the ETA will deter it. As I've seen in many cases involving the ESTA System, people will just throw up their hands and say I don't want to mess with that or they'll say why is this country that is supposedly so easy to get into that I want to just come spend my money in, putting this ring fence around themselves, this sort of digital bureaucracy that again makes me just want to throw up my hands and not come. Meanwhile, people can get stuck in these sort of Byzantine rivers and channels and eddies of the ESTA system which results in just a bunch of catch-22 nonsense for somebody that really is not a bad actor. So at the end of the day and the point I.am trying to make with this, I have seen the problems that arose in the aftermath of the George W. Bush Administration and the creation of ESTA. One of the big ones has been, look legal tourists went way down in the United States like a lot, and it went down because of issues associated not only with ESTA but also just this massive tightening of legal Immigration Policy and meanwhile the complete explosion of illegal immigration which I'm not even going to get into that, but it led to this real decreasing, this clamping down of legal immigration which has a positive financial benefit to the United States and again we have seen an explosion of illegal immigration which has a negative financial benefit or a negative financial implication to the United States.

Again I really hope Thailand does not repeat the same mistake of the United States because creating this ETA I think could have a very negative impact on travel to Thailand and tourism numbers here in the Kingdom of Thailand.